To Wash Away What's Past
by N1ghthawk
Summary: The ghosts in his head won't leave Raleigh alone, no matter what he does. They won't even let him die.
1. Spirits in my head and they won't go

"I decided to explain why Raleigh isn't in the sequel with Mako, and it got a little out of hand...

Disclaimer: I do not own Pacific Rim. Obviously, since I'm writing my own version of the sequel ;)

#

Raleigh wishes the sleet on the window, the drunken yelling at a football game on a glaring TV screen, or the rapidly disappearing brown liquid in his glass would drown out the voices. "He's a has-been… You're gonna get us all killed, and here's the thing, Raleigh: I want to come back from this mission because I quite like my life. So why don't you just do us all a favor and disappear? It's the only thing you're good at."

He came here to try and forget, for a little while. He should have known better. It never worked when it was Yancy in his head. But he thought that was because of the Drift. He shouldn't still hear that cocky Hansen kid, or the Marshal.

"And if I can't get that…then you can go back to the wall that I found you crawling on. Do I make myself clear?"

 _Pathetic. Washed up. Has-been. Failure_.

Those demons should be buried with the Kaiju under tons of Pacific Ocean. He saved the damn world, didn't he? Shouldn't that make him not those things anymore?

The guys here think so. They recognize him from television coverage, he thinks, because the second he came in they were crowding around and offering to buy him drinks. Should have expected this in Seattle, he guesses. He and Mako have been all over the world, but it's always the cities on the Pacific rim who are the most grateful. The ones the Jaegers actually defended. They know how much they stood to lose. People in New York and England and South Africa were polite, but he never felt the same kind of gratitude from them. _If we hadn't closed the Breach you'd understand all too well._

It doesn't bother him, really, even if he does think about it. He didn't do this for the praise. He didn't want to be a hero. He just wanted to put the voices in his head to rest. And what did he get for that? Two more of them that won't let him go.

He knows, logically, that he isn't alone. Mako suffers with the same losses and fears he does. He knows because of the nights they've found their way to each other's hotel rooms, sitting up with mugs of tea and silence because what is there to say when you've been inside each other's heads?

Mako is his lifeline, but he feels like he's dragging her down. Far more often it's him that has to seek her out, not her coming to find him. She doesn't need his baggage, him reminding her every day of the people she lost. She needs a fresh start and she'll never get it with him holding on. He can admit it, to himself, he needs her far more than she'll need him. She has a future. She's smart, talented, a hero. She can get any engineering job she wants, anywhere she wants. She can have anyone she wants.

And what's he? Deadweight, just like his screwed-up left arm is now, someone who shouldn't have lived…he shouldn't have, not when her father and Chuck didn't get to. He has less to live for than they did. It should have been him…

It's not until he's outside and half a block away that he realizes he forgot his coat. He almost goes back to get it. He hates the cold.

"Raleigh, listen to me!" _Cold rain coming in through the gaping wound in Gipsy's conn pod. Yance being…being torn out and thrown into the storm. Rain and cold and fear and pain and all alone_ …

"Hey, man, you alright?" He doesn't realize he's sitting on the ground, knees pulled to his chest, gasping for breath and sobbing, until someone's hand is on his arm. He looks up and there's kindly eyes in a dark face…just like Stacker when he was watching Mako… "Do you need me to call someone? A taxi? An ambulance?"

Raleigh realizes what he must look like to this man. With his bleary eyes, only half from the alcohol, half of that redness is sleeplessness; his conspicuously missing coat as he's sitting here soaked and shivering in the rain, the smell of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar, and the way he's breaking down in the middle of the street; it all screams homeless junkie. _But I don't have a home, so maybe he's right_.

"N-No, I'll b-be okay." _No I won't._ _But nothing you can do for me will make the voices go away. I need them out of my head and no one can do that_.He doesn't realize he said that out loud until the man starts backing away, compassion quickly being replaced with fear. As soon as the guy feels like he's a safe distance away, he's going to call the police, or an ambulance, or both. Raleigh needs to be gone.

He gets up, staggering. If he doesn't stay close to the walls he'll walk right into traffic. Maybe he should. Maybe then the voices will stop.

"Raleigh listen to me!" One voice won't. Yance doesn't sound like he did that night in Gipsy, he sounds more frightened now, if that's possible. More urgent. This is the sound Raleigh hears every time he watches blood drip into the sink drain, every time he pulls down the sleeves of his sweaters Mako teases him for wearing in all weather, every time he stares off the edge of a bridge, so much shorter than the Wall, knowing this time he wouldn't even have to undo a safety harness. No one would be liable. No one would care.

Mako would care. Would she feel it, like he did when Yance…when Knifehead…that night? Would half her mind turn into a burning, searing black hole of nothingness that somehow still hurts like hell? Would she wake up screaming? He should have asked Herc what it was like when Chuck died. If he dies, will he hurt Mako? He can't hurt someone else. He has too many ghosts already, and who's to say they won't follow him even when he's dead? They obviously aren't at peace. He's sure he won't be if that's the case.

He could keep walking, not back to the hotel but to somewhere, anywhere, where he can't wreck anyone else's life. Mako will wonder where he's gone, but she won't feel his loss; his death won't scar her mind forever. And sooner or later she'll move on. This is best for everyone. No one else has to get hurt. Only Raleigh, and he can live with it. It's fair enough. He's certainly not innocent in all this. He deserves whatever happens to him. Whether a car slips or doesn't see him in this weather, if he gets sick like Yance always told him would happen if he stayed outside in the rain, if someone decides he's worth killing over the few dollars and the useless PPDC ID in his wallet; it doesn't matter. As long as he doesn't do it himself, Yancy can't blame him. Right? _Damn it, now you choose not to answer me_.

"Why don't you just do us all a favor and disappear?" It's too late, far too late, but he's going to give Chuck Hansen what he wanted. Maybe that's the only way to get the ghosts to leave him be.

#

So, any good? Should I feed it to a Kaiju as soon as possible? Drop me a comment and let me know! (Also if people want, I can make this into a full story instead of a oneshot because I am working on a full storyline for this AU)


	2. This is how the world ends

I really really wanted to add to this, so thanks to you, AlwaysTardy, and your encouraging review, I'm posting the rest of the chapters I have written right now. I plan on this being a fifteen to twenty chapter fic, maybe longer, and I hope to update at least once a week!

I'm playing fast and loose with canon here, setting the sequel only two years after the events of the movie.

#

Mako wakes up to her phone's ringtone, or more specifically the annoyingly loud theme to _Bill Nye the Science Guy_ that Raleigh, after stealing her phone password in the Drift (really, he can be such a child sometimes, with all the little ridiculous things he does), set up for when Newt Geisler calls her. She wonders what bizarre thing he's had a breakthrough on now that he felt the need to call at three-thirty in the morning. They're even in the same time zone as him, with his lab at the Jaeger construction facility in LA now, so she can't even assume he forgot there's such a thing as time differences (case in point that ridiculous call at two in the morning when she and Raleigh were in London). More likely he's forgotten there is such a thing as time.

Maybe he's finally figured out the upgrade to the Drift helmets. Mako's work on the new generation of Jaegers has been praised as the most outstanding engineering feat since the construction of the originals, but the real crowning glory will be the new wire-free Drift system.

Now that they're no longer at war, Mako has been free to design the best Jaegers ever made. There's no more pressure to make them easy to quickly assemble, or to create them as minimalistically as possible. Her new Jaegers are still incredibly devoted to function over form, but she's added her own flair after years of watching so many generations of them. She knows what worked and what did not. Her work restoring Gipsy gave her some ideas, and watching even Cherno Alpha in action taught her there are some things you should never try to improve upon.

If Newt's had a breakthrough, that tech is going straight into the flagship Jaeger of her new twelve-machine project. Gipsy Avenger is like her child. She's put the absolute best of her namesake into this one, and all the things she wished they'd had. She's never been more proud.

But when she answers the phone Newt isn't his bubbly, wildly enthusiastic self. There's fear behind his few words. "Mako, the buoys found something."

"What? That's impossible." Mako feels a cold chill drift down her spine. Newt inisisted on setting buoys around the Breach site, simply as a precaution. After all, no one wanted a spot where there had already been one tear in reality to be left unwatched.

"It's nothing too impressive, but there's some sort of activity. Disturbances." Newt is being disturbingly noncommittal. Usually when he's in science mode he's using tons of terms that go over Mako's head, sometimes because Newt invented them. Gottlieb swears the man's going to write the definitive K-Science dictionary someday. So to hear him saying things as vague as "activity" or "disturbance" is far more frightening than if he were spouting off nine-syllable words. Mako has learned this too well. She knows that when people use big words, they have big plans, they have things they can do, and they know what they are talking about. She heard so many of them those first years, waiting for _sensei_ in uncomfortable hospital chairs, while the doctors talked about what was happening to his body. Then, they used words like "radiation-activated leukemia" and "treatment options". When they started saying "cancer", she knew it was over. Most people are afraid of big, complicated words. Mako is afraid of small ones.

"Let me know when you know more." She hangs up, because if she's on the phone any longer she thinks Newt is going to start trying to reassure her, and she doesn't want him lying to her.

She needs to tell Raleigh, because chances are even if Newt is trying to call him right now, he's got his phone on silent. He doesn't sleep well and he hates to be disturbed when he does manage to get a few hours in.

She's reaching for her slippers when she knows, as clearly as if she went and looked in the room itself, that Raleigh isn't there. He didn't come back tonight. She shivers again, and then becomes aware that the cold isn't the chilly room (because the heater is on full), or fear because of what Newt said (her fear is always hot and breathless, like running down a burning city street). Wherever Raleigh is right now, he is cold and alone. She tries to reach out through the Drift, but the connection is faint and getting fainter, like watching Kaiju Blue fade out into the water.

It was a Shatterdome urban legend that co-pilots could locate the other person anywhere in the complex, just by their connection. She and Chuck had decided to test it, because what else do you do growing up as kids in Shatterdomes? Their plan was to wait until a pair separated (which was rare in itself) and ask one person where their partner was, and then text the co-pilot to check for accuracy. They did it to all the pilots, except the Kaidanovskys, for obvious reasons. In the few times they'd managed to find a separated Drift team willing to make the experiment, the prediction had been spot-on. Although that might have had something to do with the fact that most of those separations had been medically imposed, so being told the partner was in the infirmary really wasn't all that big a shock.

Maybe the connection only works over short distances, or maybe three Drifts, one of them failed and one cut off mid-battle, isn't exactly enough to work with. In any case, all she gets through it are cold, biting sleety rain, and a few thoughts. _Deadweight. "Disappear, it's the only thing you're good at." Has-been. Better off alone. Can't hurt anyone else._

"Raleigh!" She screams his name out loud, like somehow that will get through. Maybe he can feel her, just a little, because the thoughts change before they become so dim all she feels is cold. _I'm sorry. Please don't worry. Just let me go._

She can't imagine what's happened. Is he injured, somewhere out there in the city? Was there a car accident? Has he been mugged? She wonders about Kaiju Cultists. Stacker used to warn her to be careful because of them, that they would try to kill her for surviving Onibaba, and then later for training to be a Jaeger pilot. They've all but disappeared after the closing, but there might be some die-hards who want to use Raleigh to make a statement.

Has he done something…Mako is no one's fool. She knows about the cuts on his arms, the Google searches for how many of those sleeping pills he takes will be enough to make sure he never wakes up. Raleigh isn't a quitter, and she knows that, but maybe he's reached the breaking point. _I should have said something. I was trying to be careful, to avoid pushing him farther. Maybe I made a mistake. If he dies because I didn't try to help him cope, that's on me._ The thought galvanizes her into action. She wanted him to prove he trusted her, and was this what that was going to end with?

She's exchanging the slippers for a pair of boots when the phone rings again. It's "Great Southern Land," so Herc. How much time did Raleigh have on his hands that day? When she finds him, and she will, he's going to hear how she feels about this joke. As soon as she's made sure he isn't in imminent danger of dying.

She answers the phone and tucks it against her shoulder, jamming her foot into a boot. "Yes Herc?"

"Mako. I'm so sorry…" Her first thought is that somehow he's heard what happened to Raleigh before she did. Maybe someone found his PPDC ID? But he has a paper with her name and number on itas emergency contact, like she has his. Maybe Kaiju cultists did take him, and they're making it public. Oh God. If they have him...she's heard stories _Sensei_ tried to keep from her, the things that were done to a pair of pilots on leave who got drunk and let their guard down...She realizes she faded out when Herc asks her again, "Mako, are you still with me?"

"What did you say?"

"They're saying the breach is opening and we're going back to war. Wanted you to hear it from me before McTavish." She guesses it's a pretty accurate gauge of how messed up her life is now that hearing that is almost a relief. She knows in a couple seconds the reality will set in and she'll realize everything has gone to hell again, but for the moment all she can feel is grateful that Raleigh isn't being tortured by those twisted fanatics, who would broadcast their work to the whole world.

"Mako, they're probably going to call you back in." Herc is no longer Marshal. He didn't want to stay there, in the Shatterdomes, with the memories. She doesn't blame him. She also doesn't have time to think about the full implications of this before the phone buzzes, with McTavish's number.

"Herc, I have to take this."

McTavish isn't young, but he's not a combat officer, and she misses Herc's gruffness and casual leadership. This is all crisp and official and impersonal. Even her name. "Ranger Mori, we're moving up the schedule of deploying your Jaeger team. Are they prepared?"

"What?"

"Ranger, are the Jaegers ready?"

"They're still in finalization. I have to install Drift systems in one, and calibrate all of them. They're still a week from deployment at minimum." In the War days, it would be a matter of hours, not days, but that's how Drift flaws got skipped and pilots got killed. She isn't risking the lives of any of her twenty-four trainees. Now she knows how _sensei_ must have felt, watching her get into a Drift harness with someone whose brother died in a Jaeger.

"Geisler's buoys are reporting Breach activity. There's sizable readings and they're getting larger. We have to be ready to deploy at any minute. We're sending a helo to Seattle to pick you and Becket up and get you to LA."

He won't beat around the bushes, so neither will she. She isn't leaving until she fixes the first problem she has on her hands. The world may be ending (again), but her first loyalty is to her co-pilot. It doesn't matter if the world burns or not if she loses him. "Marshal, Becket's missing."

"He's what?"

"He never came back this evening. I'm about to head out to find him. I think he's in trouble. I was getting some things in the ghost drift. Give me two hours…"

"We can't wait. The helo touches down in ten and I need you on that thing ASAP. Notify the Seattle police to be looking for Becket, and get down here and get working on your Jaegers."

She wants to tell them they can set the damn things up themselves. They have all the techs she trained, familiar enough with the processes to no longer need guidance from a combat-experienced veteran. But she has her pilots to worry about, because she knows them better than anyone and she has to make sure everything is just right. She knows what Raleigh would say. He'd tell her twenty four lives were a lot more important than one. She knows that's what the Marshal is thinking. If it were her missing, he'd order Raleigh to find her as soon as he could. But the Marshal doesn't need Raleigh to get his war machines ready. He only needs Mako. Raleigh is always the one they can afford to leave behind, to everyone who has worked with him since he came back, except Mako. It's no wonder he's begun to believe it. And now she's about to abandon him too. Even though she knows he'd tell her to go, she feels guilty.

She stops at Raleigh's room before running downstairs to catch the car to the airport. Each of them has an extra key to the other's room. It's probably useless to hope he'll come back here, but she leaves him a note in case, and she calls his phone to leave a message, even though if he doesn't want to be found the first thing he'll do is throw it away somewhere.

She still feels achingly cold through the ghost Drift, and as she's preparing to leave she sees one of Raleigh's sweaters, the old brown one with the hole in the shoulder he refused to let her fix, folded on the chair in the corner. She picks it up and shrugs it on, feeling like she's disappearing in it. She takes two more of his sweaters from his suitcase and shoves them in her own bag. It's silly, but they smell like him and he once joked that he'd like to see her in one. She wants him to come back so she can show him she's wearing one and yes, she does look like an idiot in it. She doesn't care. They're the only connection she has left to him once the helicopter takes off and carries her away from Seattle.


	3. A hero and a has-been

I'm planning on doing this story in alternating POVs between Mako and Raleigh, except a few places where I may need to do multiple chapters with one of them because of events.

#

Raleigh hears about the Breach on the scratchy radio in the pickup truck on the I-90. He guesses he's lucky the rancher's wife signing paperwork in Seattle was willing to take the risk that he wasn't some sort of deranged serial killer. The fact that he was drenched and just standing in the rain like he didn't have the sense or the will to get himself out of it (he didn't), shivering on the street corner in only his old sweater and a pair of jeans, and the "lost puppy" eyes she said he'd had probably didn't hurt. He guesses he's lucky _she's_ not a serial killer, although he can't be entirely sure, since there's a shotgun resting across the back window and her scarred, brawny hands on the steering wheel remind him she probably isn't the sort of person to be joking around with. Any woman who picks up a random guy off the side of the road has to be pretty damn confident that she's stronger or smarter than he is.

At least the pickup is warm. Raleigh was sure he was going to have to spend the night under a bridge or something. His clothes are still wet, and he's hunched over trying to soak up as much of the heat from the hissing, squealing air vent as he can when the radio stops playing a bad cover of "Don't Stop Believing" and an announcer begins speaking in a stressed, tense voice. He doesn't really bother listening; it's probably more news about the storm, which is now snow that his ride's driver is cursing quite creatively. He blinks and shakes his head when he hears a very familiar name.

"At 5 am, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps issued a statement that they had discovered activity in the monitors surrounding the former Breach Zone." _I'm dreaming, right? This is just a really bad reaction to the sleep meds. I really shouldn't have taken them with that much alcohol, that's got to be the problem, right?_

He kicks his foot against his leg, but nothing changes. The voice keeps on going. "Marshal McTavish has scheduled a press conference for 10 this morning to address the situation, and we at KLT will be broadcasting it live."

"Hey! Turn that up!" The woman reaches over and adjusts the dial herself. Raleigh thinks the only thing that got louder is the static.

"Until then, we're going to have to speculate, but it has been confirmed from reliable sources that Kaiju War hero Ranger Mako Mori is en route to LA, where her new Jaegers are in construction. It's a safe bet that Mori is being called back from her and Ranger Becket's meeting with Wall deconstruction advocates in Seattle to prepare her Jaegers for deployment. Obviously the Marshal is more concerned than he's let on, if he's preparing his military force." _Oh shit. This can't be happening. This is too much like a bad movie to be real. They can't be coming back. We closed it. Chuck and the Marshal died doing it. I…I died closing it. They can't be coming back._ He can feel the beginning of a panic attack coming on, the tight close feeling like he's trapped in an escape pod, the suffocating lack of oxygen, the burning of Gipsy self-destructing and the searing light of a world whose sky looked like it was on fire.

"Oh hell." The woman sounds more frustrated than frightened. "Those fuckers are gonna rain hell down again, and everything's gonna get too damn expensive to do anything. Just got the stock built up decent again."

The radio is still talking over her, both of them oblivious to the fact that he's about to scream, throw up, pass out, or all three, right there in the passenger seat. "There's still no word on Mori's former co-pilot, Ranger Raleigh Becket. Becket is also a Kaiju War veteran, but after the final offensive was deemed too badly injured from solo piloting to ever pilot a combat Jaeger again. Becket was not seen with Mori, which has already led to some rumors that Mori is going back into combat and will be assigned a new co-pilot when she reaches LA. After all, it only makes sense to put the only remaining viable Jaeger veteran back in duty." He knows Herc was done after Chuck died. His stomach clenches. Once again, it's his fault. "She's already saved the world once and Marshal McTavish may be hoping she's got it in her to do it again."

"Huh. Another Raleigh." The woman is grinning. "Never heard that name before today, and now there's two of ya." Raleigh laughs and he's sure she knows it was fake. He has to get out of here.

 _Stupid, to use your real name._ Not that he was capable of thinking of that much last night, with as drunk as he was. He did have the presence of mind to take his IDs out of his wallet, but he was so cold and so tired when the truck stopped.

Obviously she hasn't connected the dots yet. But the next thing they'll say is that he's missing and the police are searching for him. Or they'll stop at a gas station and news coverage from when they closed the Breach will be up.

He should be there, with Mako in the helicopter headed to LA. He should be right there at her side, because he's her co-pilot. But co-pilots are there to fight by each other, and he can't do that anymore. The radio announcer was right; if they want Mako back in combat they need to give her a new partner. He rubs his left shoulder and shudders when he can't even feel his hand touching it. The med techs did what they could for him, but solo piloting again destroyed the nerves beyond repair. His right arm isn't all that great either, but the left one is basically dead. Some days are better than others, but in cold weather like this…

He shivers at the thought of going back outside. He may not exactly be enjoying this ride, but he was hoping the ranch might need someone who's good at fixing things. Not that anyone's going to want a mechanic with one good arm. He's not going to be relying on anyone's charity, not because of his pride (he has none left, especially not after that ill-fated press conference someone decided to schedule on the first of March, and then the tactless reporter with her questions about Yance. The only good thing about that was that after he basically had a complete meltdown on national television, Mako was the one in charge of making all the obligatory PR appearances. She's better at that kind of thing). First of all, he's far too likely to be recognized if he goes to any of the homeless shelters or some other place he could stay. People tend to recognize someone who saved the world. And if he's being honest with himself, that's only half the reason, but it's the only one he can justify. Really, he's pretty sure no one should be forced to take care of a washed-up, no longer useful failure.

He knows this isn't a good train of thought and the J-psych therapist he was assigned to after that interview incident would be smacking him in the leg right now and telling him that's not true. Raleigh was surprised how much he actually liked the guy, Samir, he thinks his name was. Kid was nice for a shrink, and he didn't go easy on Raleigh. He hates when people pity him, and Samir didn't ever seem to. He wasn't above a good slap to the leg or Raleigh's good (which is a very relative term) arm if he started going into that downward spiral. Samir tested for the Jaegers himself, just never found anyone compatible enough. So he knows that when pilots go into those places, it's stronger than it is for normal people. It's like chasing the R.A.B.I.T. and you have to do something drastic to get them back. The psych tech before him kept trying to talk Raleigh out of those spells and it never did any good.

He wonders if it's a good sign that he actually noticed he was slipping this time. Last night he couldn't tell until he was too far gone. Maybe the alcohol had something to do with that. He wonders if Samir will miss him; the guy said Raleigh was one of his most memorable patients, but refused to say if that was in a good way or in a "everything after you will be a piece of cake" kind of idea. Maybe the guy will be glad to get rid of him. They hadn't been seeing any improvement in weeks…

He's doing it again. He pinches his leg, hard, and then starts breathing slowly, in and out, focusing on the action like Samir's taught him. He has to stop thinking about this…he has to stop thinking about thinking about stopping it. That's enough to put his brain in a tangle. Maybe he's still a little bit drunk.

"Hey, I gotta make a pit stop here. You need to come in?" The driver is pulling into a gas station, and Raleigh wonders if she really does need the bathroom or if she's finally picked up on him acting like he may throw up.

"No. I'm good." She's given him a good opportunity to walk away before she learns the truth, he can't afford to waste it.

"Okay, suit yourself. Isn't another one between here and the farm, so if you need to pee you're doing it on the side of the road," the woman mutters, and then says something he can't really understand but might have been to the effect that doing that in this weather might freeze off a certain part of his anatomy he'd rather keep.

He waits until she's inside, then opens the truck door. The snow-filled wind instantly numbs his hands and face, and bites right through the wet wool sweater. He almost changes his mind. But then he sees the scrolling news bulletin on the TV over the inside counter, and the shaky phone camera footage of the Kaiju tearing through Hong Kong last time they came, then being annihilated by Gipsy, and then a quick cut to live news footage of Mako stepping off a helo in LA. It's eerily similar to his own memories of Hong Kong.

 _She's already saved the world once and Marshal McTavish may be hoping she's got it in her to do it again._ The world needs Mako Mori back in a Jaeger. If he goes back, she'll refuse to pilot with anyone else, and the only people facing the Kaiju returning will be a group of kids with no combat experience. They may be smart and tough, but they need a leader who's right there with them. They need someone who can understand what it's like to be in the center of a chaotic war spinning out of control and have your Jaeger ripped apart, or to fall out of sync mid-Drift and panic, lost in your partner's worst memories. They can learn all about it in theory, but when it actually happens, in a combat situation, they need someone who knows, firsthand.

The world needs Mako Mori, hero. It doesn't need Raleigh Becket, has-been.


	4. My Brother's keeper

And now we meet a character who may be familiar...

#

Mako steps off the helicopter into sun and warmth. She can already feel sweat under Raleigh's heavy sweater, but she refuses to take it off. It feels wrong enough not having him right here beside her when she's going back to a Shatterdome. It would be too painful to bear if she didn't have some part of him to hold onto. Literally, because right now her fist is clenched around a handful of the over-long sleeve as Marshal McTavish steps up to meet her. If she doesn't keep a good grip on that, she might punch him in the face. He treated Raleigh like he didn't matter. Like he was useless.

"Ranger, we've got everything prepped for you. Your techs are all ready and the systems are primed." That takes a long time. Did he drag all her techs out of bed and in to work at 4 am? Those systems are complicated and her techs should have been wide awake and focused to set them up. _He tried to speed things up and now all he's done is cause a setback. I'll have to go over every connection with them again, because I am not letting someone have a Drift malfunction just because he wants to up the clock._

She tries not to let the anger show, but she is going to let him know in no uncertain terms that she will not be cutting corners. "I'll have to check them all again, just to be sure. And I'd like to recommend that the team assigned to pilot Gipsy Avenger stand down. We've been holding off on installing her Drift tech, and…"

"Her systems were installed this morning, the same ones as in the other Jaegers."

"You can't put in a Drift system in a few hours."

"Actually, we can. The only things missing were the pilot rigs, the rest of the system was wired." He has no idea what kind of work actually goes into installing. If he'd told Mako he was going to do this, she would have shut him down immediately. It isn't as simple as hooking wires together and attaching some bolts to the rigs. The slightest mistake, a frayed wire connection, a bad sensor, a misplaced connector, and someone could go into an eternal coma when they hook in. Installing a system takes days of testing, recalibrating, and double checking everything.

"Gipsy Avenger will not be ready to deploy."

"I suggest you focus your attention on her, then, and let your techs test the others. Because I'd like you in her and ready to deploy at 0600 tomorrow morning at the latest."

"Excuse me, Marshal?" Mako knows what she heard. She'd been thinking about it the whole way down. McTavish only told her she was coming for the Jaeger finalizing, but he's no fool, even if he is an insufferable prick (she remembers Sensei calling him that when they met the man at some PPDC function). He knows she's the only pilot left who has both been in combat and is also still capable of piloting. But her co-pilot is missing, and they can't just pair _Mako Mori_ , the girl with the monster in her head, off with just anyone. Even McTavish isn't that much of a risk taker.

"Ranger Mori, we've determined that your adoptive brother, Jake Pentecost, is sufficiently drift compatible with you for you two to compose Gipsy Avenger's combat team."

She wants to scream, throw something, shatter McTavish's spine for this. Jake's just a kid. She still thinks of him as that sweet little boy who came into her room unannounced at three in the morning and asked if she needed someone to help keep the monsters away (it was so precious that he asked her what she asked him when he had his own nightmares, she loved that kid). She thinks of the huge smile the day he completed the model Gipsy Danger she bought him for his tenth birthday, not without sticking his fingers all together with that instant bond glue. She thinks of the boy who cried on her shoulder after his father told him he was going to finish school and go to a real college, not the Academy. And the young man who, after dropping a handful of dirt on an empty coffin, apologized to his father's spirit and then went off to follow in his footsteps, saying Stacker couldn't have objected much now since the Jaegers were no longer for a war.

She can't quite make that match with the tall, broad-shouldered nineteen year old with a serious face and perfect posture, waiting inside the doors when they enter. They've made her baby brother into a soldier, and she will never forgive them.

And then the door opens and her little brother is back, all smile and sparkling eyes and looking so damn much like his father she wants to cry, even as she laughs and hugs him, formality be damned.

"Mako! We're going to by co-pilots!" She can hear the enthusiasm in his voice, and she knows it all too well. It was her, back in Hong Kong, when Raleigh called her out on the training mat. When he asked her what she wanted to do with her life. When Stacker handed her the old shoe and let her get in Gipsy.

Now she's the one with the battle scars, the one who has to tell the enthusiastic, naïve child that war isn't about glory and being a hero. It's about surviving. _I've become Raleigh_. She would laugh if thinking about him didn't make her feel like part of her heart had just died.

"Yeah. We are." She remembers hours spent with this kid in the house, building Jaegers out of cardboard boxes and pretending to be in Drift together, fighting imaginary monsters (and when they lived in the house with the yard, the neighbor's dog) with brooms and tennis balls. He used to make Mako promise she'd wait for him before she went off to fight, so they could be pilots together. He wanted to name their future Jaeger Dragon Slayer. And then life happened, and Stacker refused to let either of them be pilots, and the play fights and dreams stopped.

If she refuses, she has no doubt Jake will simply ask for another co-pilot. He'll go out there with someone else. Someone who doesn't, can't, know him like she does.

She lost Sensei. She will not lose his son. If she is there, in the Jaeger with him, she will be able to do all she can to ensure that he makes it through this alive. "Okay, Marshal. I'll pilot with Ranger Pentecost."

#

I decided to go with at least enough of the sequel that Jake makes an appearance, because I really wanted to explore his and Mako's sibling relationship, and how she would react to him being a pilot after she already lost his father.


	5. Friends in low places

I have a head canon that Raleigh didn't just go straight to working on the Wall after he left the Jaegers, so I decided to play around with an idea of what his past might have been like in that five-year period we know almost nothing about.

#

Raleigh _is_ sleeping under a bridge now. Or more accurately, curled up shivering and thinking if he falls asleep he may wake up with frozen fingers, toes, or nose. Or not wake up at all. The second option is acceptable. The first will just make his life worse.

The good things about his day so far have been finding a good spot to get discarded food behind a grocery store, and meeting a homeless guy willing to give Raleigh a perfectly good coat he found in the trash in exchange for fixing the guy's old radio. The thing is an antique, if the guy was smart he'd pawn it, but maybe it's got some sentimental value to him. Raleigh was never one for sentimental, didn't understand it, until Yancy died. Then he kept the old sweaters, the photos, even a pair of socks for a while, anything that made his brother feel a little bit less gone. In any case, the guy seemed pretty happy about Raleigh's repair, because he gave him the coat and a scarf on top of that.

The good thing about homeless people is that a lot of them tend to look out for each other. Most people think they're a bunch of crazies or drug addicts who are dangerous, sly loners, but Raleigh knows better. He learned fast that first winter in Anchorage, when he didn't have the motivation to drag himself to stand in a frigid line for Wall construction ration cards all day, only to be turned down because the guy just three people ahead of him filled the last spot.

For a little while, Raleigh had tried surviving on his own. He turned down anyone who asked if he wanted help, worried they were only trying to help themselves, but when someone caught him asleep and threatened him at knifepoint for the three dollars and some spare change in his wallet, and when he was disappointed, took his anger out on Raleigh (his arms are still scarred, those are higher than the others, but it was the first time he realized the pain could make him forget), he was forced to find someone else he could trust.

He met a woman and two kids who'd lost their home, their father, and their oldest son to a Kaiju attack, and the woman, Bekka, did a decent job patching up his arms and taught him how to avoid being found at night. She had to be smart to have been on the streets with those kids for, she'd told him, three years then. He wonders what happened to her. She had friends who looked out for her, Jerry, a drug dealer who had a decent code of ethics that at the very least meant he protected the women on the streets in his territory and made sure no one but him brought in anything to sell. And there was Ruben, the former schoolteacher who lost his job and his home after he came out as gay, and the school decided he couldn't be trusted with the children anymore, and had one of the kids fake a sexual harassment charge. In spite of how badly people had treated him, Rube had been a kind guy, whose only mean bone in his body was the knuckles in his impressive right hook. Bekka made sure they looked out for Raleigh too, and it was the closest thing he had to family until the cops caught Jerry; and Raleigh, after deciding fighting anyone who tried to take over for him was only going to get him killed, finally went back to the Wall and actually got a job.

Another good thing about homeless people is that they tend to be too busy surviving to worry about who you are or who you were. Bekka knew he used to be a pilot, because she saw the drivesuit scars on his arms when she was cleaning up the knife injuries, but she never asked why he wasn't still in a Jaeger. On the streets, everyone has a painful past and they know not to bring it up unless the other person trusts them enough to share it.

The not so good things about today have been the Kaiju coming back, Mako leaving, and the way Raleigh feels like he might be getting sick. He also knows from experience that on the streets that can be deadly. Bekka's daughter Grace almost died from a simple cold, because the weather was bad and it turned into bronchitis. She lived because they were able to take her to a public hospital and someone from a local church heard about it and footed the bill. Raleigh can't go to a hospital unless he wants them to drag him down to LA where he'll have to watch helplessly while Mako goes off to war again without him beside her.

"Hey man, you alright?" Someone is shaking Raleigh's bad shoulder. He didn't feel them there, and when they speak up he reacts with a reflex, grabbing the person's arm and slamming them to the ground.

"Whoa sorry man. I'm not stealin' anything." The person is currently laying on the ground, panting. The first thing Raleigh notices is that this person is small, smaller than Mako even. The next thing is all the color.

A knit blue beanie has fallen off of fluorescent teal and purple hair, they're wearing a jean jacket with all sorts of small sew-on patches (all of them Jaegers or Kaiju, and he thinks he saw Gipsy's nuclear core on the right shoulder) that is mostly hiding a green shirt with some sort of band logo on it, maybe the "Breach Beasts" (Raleigh only knows they're a metal band that started after 2020, he didn't have much time to listen to music working on the Wall, but he's sure they're popular with the younger generation). Red and grey tennis shoes and a pair of jeans with what look like Kaiju drawn on with Sharpie marker.

The kid could be the love child of Newt Geisler and a package of Skittles. _Ok. That was too weird_. Raleigh shakes his head. _I must be worse off than I thought if that's what's floating around in my head_.

"What are you, some kinda ninja?" The kid bounces back on their feet, grinning. "That was awesome. Can you show me how to do it?"

"Not right now. I think I might freeze solid before I even got up."

"If you need a place to stay I know a guy. He's got a house he lets people stay at when they get kicked out by their families or stuff. As long as you're not like a murderer or a rapist or something he'll be chill with you staying."

"What the hell kid?" Raleigh is having trouble processing, with how fast the kid's talking. And Mako said he has too much energy.

"It's gonna get bad tonight and you looked like you didn't have anywhere to go. I just thought I'd try and help." The kid looks kind of crushed. "And I really want you to show me that move. I could use that."

Raleigh stands stiffly, shivering even more when he loses what little warmth huddling was giving him. _How the hell is the kid out here in just that jacket?_ "Thanks for stopping. But you probably shouldn't have trusted me not to hurt you, you know." Kid's gonna die on the streets fast if they don't know to be at least a little more cautious.

"I got this, I'm fine." The kid pulls a ridiculously large knife out of their boot. Raleigh shakes his head; they'd have been dead before they even could reach the handle, but the confidence is kind of catching.

"Let's go see this friend of yours before we both turn into popsicles, huh?" The kid nods, and then reaches out a hand to him, pulling off a grimy winter glove.

"By the way, I'm Kenzie."

"Ray."


	6. Where my demons hide

Sorry it took me a while to get this next chapter uploaded! I thought I had updated it on here and then was looking and realized I didn't have the latest chapters up!

###

Mako can design an entire new Drift system for a Jaeger. She can create joints that move with 120% the efficiency of any previous model. But she can't seem to find the right things to say to Jake while they're standing in the suiting room, preparing to Drift test in Gipsy Avenger, which Mako has spent the past twenty hours going over until she's fairly certain the system won't send her or her brother into limbo the second they go online. There might be a few bugs left, but Mako is used to bugs. She's glad it's her going in, not one of the trainees. They haven't ever dealt with the kind of shoestring repairs Jaegers struggled by on when the PPDC became the resistance. Mako knows how to compensate for shaky connectivity or loss of motor control to part of the Jaeger because some coupling came undone.

She blames some of this weird feeling on the bone-deep exhaustion. She's had two hours of sleep in over twenty-four hours now, and the Marshal is breathing down her neck to get this done. Newt's readings are growing, and while he hasn't spotted any actual Kaiju, everyone is sure it's only a matter of time. She hasn't actually seen Newt at all, but she can imagine him in his lab, empty coffee cups scattered around (he's had less sleep than her, he would be an absolute disaster to meet in person right now), hair wild from running his hands through it, racing back and forth across the lab and almost tripping on Hermann's cane. Gottleib flew back in today too. It looks like McTavish is trying to put the old gang back together. Except that more than half their original team is gone. _Sensei_ , Chuck and Herc, the Wei Tang clan, the Kaidanovskys…Raleigh. Even though Newt and Hermann are here somewhere, Mako feels alone.

She wonders if Jake can tell she's hesitant about this. She has to commit fully to establish a solid neural handshake, and all she can think is that her co-pilot is somewhere alone and maybe even dying, and here she is getting ready to Drift with someone else. It feels like cheating on a spouse, only even worse somehow. She and Raleigh saved the world together. They were the perfect team. And now she feels like she's trying to replace him.

It isn't fair to take this into the Drift with her, to put all that on Jake. It isn't his fault McTavish decided Mako was more use in a Jaeger than out of one. A few years ago this would have been her dream. Preparing to fight side by side with her brother, knowing each other's strengths and strategies almost as well as they knew their own. Now, she can't stop thinking that this isn't what she is supposed to do. She can't just pick up a new co-pilot. Then she remembers _Sensei._ He lost Tasmin, and yet he still got back in a Jaeger with Chuck Hansen, because it was what they needed to do to save the world. She can do this. _Sensei_ would tell her so. He would want her to protect Jake, and he would want her to stop the Kaiju threat that he died trying to destroy. Raleigh would want her to stop it. He died stopping them too, even if he doesn't like to admit to that or talk about it, but Mako knows there were minutes, far too many of them for her, where she couldn't feel his thoughts, where the Drift was dead. She's grateful she doesn't feel that now. The Drift with Raleigh is cold and distant, but it hasn't gone out. If it does, she's fairly sure that whatever she's doing she will simply collapse. Is this what Herc felt like when Chuck went off with _Sensei_? Is this what _Sensei_ felt when Tasmin was in the hospital? It's horrible, a powerlessness and a cold dread in Mako's stomach. If something happens to Raleigh, she can't help him.

But the danger is mutual, and she wonders if Raleigh is feeling the same way. He must know about the Breach threat now, it's being broadcast all over the country, and it was being speculated about long before the Marshal even gave his official statement. One of the techs helping Mako check Venge (she refuses to call it Gispy now, because Gipsy was hers and Raleigh's and she could let someone else pilot her, but she can't get back in another Gipsy without her co-pilot) had the news playing on his phone, and Mako could hear it, and she made him stop, because it had gone from insane theories on the most powerful world governments reopening the Breach on purpose to control the economy to someone talking about why they thought Raleigh wouldn't be returning. When the woman speaking began talking about that unfortunate interview, and seemed to be suggesting that solo piloting had done more significant damage to Raleigh's brain than everyone was told, Mako wanted to throw the phone out Venge's viewscreen to the hangar bay floor.

She hates when people talk about Raleigh like he's the weak link. She has never seen him that way. Raleigh is so much stronger than almost anyone else she knows. He's survived the death of his brother, while in Drift with him, he survived five years in brutal conditions in the far reaches of Alaska, and he managed to get back in a Jaeger, despite every terrible memory, despite the physical damage Knifehead did, and closed the Breach with Mako. He died and then he woke up again, and Mako only can begin to imagine what that is like because of the ghost Drift. She sees his nightmares sometimes, feels the phantom pains in an arm that is for all intents and purposes dead. She knows how hard he struggles just to get through a day like a semi-normal person. No, Raleigh is not weak. But being strong for so long has worn him out, and she wonders if he's reached the breaking point. She should be there to help him through it, the way she sits and listens if he wants to talk about Yance or what he saw in the Breach, sitting next to him and rubbing some of the stiffness out of his arms and shoulders so he can sleep without waking up in excruciating pain. She wonders where he's sleeping now.

"Ready, Ranger Mori?" says a voice that is painfully unfamiliar, Tendo is gone too. She realizes the techs are done installing the spine plate and she's ready to be wired into the harness. Jake is grinning at her inside his helmet, the same wide smile she remembers when she would get the broom out of the hall closet and they snuck past _Sensei'_ s office to go outside and fight the neighbor's dog.

"Ready." Her voice sounds wrong in the comms.

"Let's do this!" It's something Raleigh would say but it isn't Raleigh's voice and she almost stops right there, yanks off the helmet, and says she's out. But it's Jake, and he's familiar enough.

She hasn't locked into a harness rig in two years, but it's like what Tasmin used to say about riding a bike. Once you learn, you never forget. She feels the neural uplink engage, but it's so much smoother than the wartime ones that she almost misses it.

"Ready to go kick some dragon butt, Mako?" She almost laughs. _Sensei_ scolded Jake once for saying "kick ass" so he changed it and apparently he's never seen fit to change it back. She likes it; a little familiarity. It almost feels like they're back in the cardboard box with their hands and feet tied together with strings, like a three-legged race and cat's cradle combined. She prays they don't topple the Jaeger over like they used to get tangled up with the box.

"Initiating Drift sequence." Mako feels a blur of thoughts beginning. A few are unfamiliar, like _a woman with long black braids and dark mahogany eyes, singing over a small child who is sitting in a flower pot in a garden. A letter in the campus mailbox with the PPDC logo and a black border_. But most are mirror images of her own thoughts and dreams. _A house with a broken porch post and a half-painted cardboard box on the lawn. A red backpack and a blue one, side by side on nails by the front door_. The connection is establishing well, she and Jake are strongly compatible.

"Engaging Neural Handshake." Their brains are calibrating, the thoughts flash faster, and Mako sees Onibaba briefly but shoves it away. _Don't chase the R.A.B.I.T._ "Steady and holding at ninety-three percent. Calibration adjusting." Lower than it should be, but that's normal for a test run. Everyone is nervous, Drift compatibility wasn't completely certain, and it takes a while to adjust to the inside of someone else's head.

"How is the Drift holding, Rangers?" It's the Marshal, but it isn't _Sensei_ , and all of a sudden Mako feels her fragile control fall apart. This isn't right. Marshal Pentecost isn't here. Raleigh isn't here. She can't do this without them. They're the reason she fought. _Sensei_ is dead and Raleigh is gone…

"Right hemisphere calibration failing. Ranger Mori's falling out of the Drift." She only has a moment to think _I really have turned into Raleigh_ before she's lost in the R.A.B.I.T.

 _Endless sea, all around her, and the faint smell of burnt metal and Kaiju Blue. She sits up in the escape pod and searches for another one, but there is nothing but sea and sky._

"Mako! Mako, come back!" Jake's voice slides through for a moment, but then he's gone again.

 _There's a splash, and the pod bobs to the surface. Mako swims to it, panting, gasping, salt water in her mouth. It isn't opening, Raleigh's vitals are dead, this can't happen, they can't have done all this for him to die. She opens the hatch and pulls off his helmet and pulls him close to her like she can still find him in the Drift, like she can will his heart to sync with hers like their minds do, like instead of memories they can share life._

 _"_ _Wake up! Wake up! Please!" He's so pale, so quiet…_

"Ranger Mori!"

"Disengage pilot-to-machine connection!"

"Mako! Wake up!"

"Mako. It's just a memory!" _Raleigh's voice. No, he isn't here, how can she hear him?_ She staggers, feeling faintly through the Drift that she's being cut off from Venge. _Just like last time._ She's trying to come out, because she can feel Jake's panic. He's never seen anyone go under before, and he's terrified he's losing her.

This memory isn't hers but it isn't Jake's either. Something left in the Drift from Raleigh, even though he's miles away _. Snow on the ground and wind that freezes her lungs every time she takes a breath. Someone sleeping on the ground, tucked in a corner away from the wind. Not someone. Raleigh._ Is this a memory or reality? _Someone coming up behind her, passing her, a man with a knife in his hands._ She screams.

"Disengaging neural handshake!"

 _"_ _Don't fuck with me, you got more than that."_

 _"_ _I promise, it's everything I have."_

 _Blood, crimson on fresh snow, and pain lancing up her…Raleigh's arms. And something else. A perverse kind of release, like a vaccination hurting less because someone's pinching your leg._ She stumbles, falling out of the memory and into Jake.

"Mako! Are you okay?" Her arms are burning and she half expects them to be bleeding under the Drivesuit. She doesn't know if that was Raleigh's memories or his present. What if he's dying somewhere in that alley and he was trying to reach out to her for help? What if he dies alone, and thinks she abandoned him?

"Ranger Mori, what the hell was that?"

"Bad reaction to the machine connection. Not an issue with the compatibility with her co-pilot." She's glad someone else answered for her, because all she wants to scream back is, _it's your fucking fault for abandoning Raleigh._

"Well, then, check the connections and get them ready to go back in. I need that Jaeger and its pilots ready to deploy in three hours."

The last time this happened, she was grounded. Now, they're just going to send her back in. _Sensei_ is gone, and now she knows McTavish is nothing like him. And more than anything, now, she doesn't care about killing any Kaiju. She only wants to smash a fist through the conn room and crush McTavish under it.


	7. It seemed like a good idea at the time

Sorry for taking so long to upload a new chapter! I have this mostly written but real life got in the way, then I went to see the movie yesterday and remembered I have this to finish!

###

Raleigh is beginning to regret this. As much as he really wants a place to sleep that isn't ten degrees below freezing and a hot meal, he would prefer to stay unknown. This Kenzie kid is rattling off Jaeger stats faster than maybe even Mako could come up with, and she seems to have a fairly large obsession with Kaiju as well, especially Slattern. Raleigh guesses he should have expected that from seeing the kid's clothes. He's having a hard time not correcting her on some of the details about the fight, but honestly he's just worried she's going to take a closer look at him and realize who he is.

He knows he might be worrying for nothing, because if there is one thing he's learned, it's that people are remarkably unobservant when you are somewhere they don't expect you to be. People tended not to realize who he was when he was on the Wall, and he doubts anyone would expect him to be out here sleeping on the streets. He guesses by now the tabloids will have assumed he's run off with some woman. He hates those kind of things, but he can't say it won't help him.

He doesn't look like himself much either, lately. Since they stopped letting him do interviews, he hasn't seen a need to keep up appearances. He's got the beginnings of a scruffy beard again; even though Mako insists he shave it every time they go for some formal event, it's been…three days now?...since their last speech, and he can feel the thick stubble catching on his scarf. He hasn't been eating or sleeping all that well lately either, and he can tell it's showing. His face is more hollow than it's been since that first winter without Yance, and he looks so damn _old_ , even to himself.

Maybe the universe is on his side for once in his life, because even when she talks about Gipsy, Kensie seems much more obsessed with Mako than Raleigh. "She rebuilt the whole thing and even designed the chain sword. She's so fuckin' awesome," the girl says, throwing her hands wide and almost smacking Raleigh in the face. "Dontcha think Ranger Mori's just the best?"

"Yeah, kid, she's great." He must not have put enough enthusiasm into it, because Kensie turns around and glares at him.

"She's an engineering godesss, and a badass Kaiju killer, and she's hot as hell, and all you can say is "great"? I mean, even if you're into guys, you have to admit she's like _the_ perfect girl."

He nods. It's the best she's gonna get because he _knows_ Mako is perfect. And he left her hanging because he can't cope.

"I wonder if they're gonna give her a new partner." Kenzie sounds wistful. "If I was a few years older…and actually in the Jaeger program…"

"You want to be a pilot?"

"Don't stand a chance. I'm too crazy for them. I break all the rules."

"You know, sometimes that isn't a bad thing." Raleigh knows he's skating on thin ice here, but the kid needs someone to tell her she is better than just scraping by on the streets, doing God knows what to make a living. She needs to know she's worth something. He remembers what it felt like working on the wall, all the thoughts that kept him from sleeping at night. _Failure. Weren't good enough. Broke the rules and now you're paying. You don't belong there. You never did_. "You know, Mako's old co-pilot was like that."

"Yeah, and his brother died. And he almost did." He knows she doesn't mean to hurt him. She can't, she doesn't even know him. But it's like Knifehead's spike through his shoulder all over again. He stumbles and leans on a lightpole, praying he doesn't pass out, get sick, or spiral down into a memory. Kid doesn't need to deal with him trapped in the ghost Drift.

"Hey, you okay? It's not too much farther." Kenzie is staring at him, a little crease between her eyebrows like Mako used to have when she was worried. "Hey, are you having a seizure or something? Ray?"

" _Whatever, Ray_." That's officially it. Raleigh can't do it anymore, not with the Hansen kid's voice overlapping this one's. _What if being around me gets her hurt too? "I'd like to come back from this…I quite like my life." What if she decided to go on and go to war because of what I said to her? If she did and she got hurt it's on me…"Disappear, it's all you're good at."_

"Ray!" Kenzie is kneeling next to him, sounding almost as panicked as he is. He's trying to breathe and he can't, and this is the worst part about having one of these attacks because he _died_ once from lack of oxygen and no one can calm him down by telling him this isn't going to kill him. He can't breathe, and he's going to die. Again.

He gasps in one shaky breath and his vision clears enough to see that Kenzie is gone. _Chased her off too, you're too much trouble for anyone._

He doesn't know how long it is that he lays there, lost in memories of fire and heat and a burning sky, and burning lungs and fading heartbeat, until there's a hand on his chest that's much bigger and heavier than Kenzie's and someone's voice telling him to focus. The voice is oddly like Mako's, and that in itself is soothing enough to bring him out of that pure fear. He starts breathing again, and that in itself is enough of a relief that he finally sort of actually passes out.

He's not all the way gone, though, because he can hear them talking. "I don't know what happened. He was fine and then he just freaked out."

"Were you yammering on about Kaiju and Jaegers to him again?"

"He didn't seem to mind. He was telling me some stuff."

"Kenz, I told you, people have bad memories about that. Maybe he lost his family, you ever think of that? Maybe he's a veteran."

"Maybe it's none of your damn business," Raleigh growls, because they don't need to talk about him like he isn't there, he doesn't care if five minutes ago he was passed out on the pavement and is still currently not sure he can get up, and he hates how weak and shaky his voice sounds right now.

"Didn't realize you were still in the land of the living." A man who looks like he could be Mako's father kneels next to Raleigh's shoulder.

Kenzie picks up something laying on the ground, something that makes a metallic chink against the concrete. "You dropped these." She holds up two silver disks on a chain. _Yance's dog tags_. Raleigh couldn't bear to throw them out like every other piece of ID he had on him. Besides, he'd been carrying them around so long the writing has mostly worn off. But he can still see where they're stamped with the Gipsy Danger logo, Yance's idea when they got her painted. The light catches on the raised metal, and he watches Kenzie's whole expression changes. "Oh my God."

 _This was officially a bad idea_. Raleigh decides nope, the universe actually does still hate him.

" _You're_ Raleigh Becket." He wants to tell her he isn't, that those are just fake, that it's just that he's like her and finds the Jaegers fascinating. But they're going to know anyway. The way he reacted to what she said about Yance…

"Thought you looked familiar," the man says, and extends a hand. "What are you doing so far from home? Your co-pilot's in LA. You get mugged or something?"

Raleigh doesn't want someone else's pity. He's had far too much of it from people who don't, can't, understand his life. "Why don't you all just fuck off and leave me alone?" He wants to curl up in a ball on the pavement and die.

The man looks at him sadly. "I can see you've got some demons you're running from; God knows I've seen it before. If you want to leave, go ahead. But my door is open and you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, and you don't have to be anyone you don't want to be. You hear?"

He doesn't want to go with them. He can feel Kenzie staring at him in equal parts admiration and confusion, although she's had the sense to keep her mouth shut. Or the guy telling her off is still fresh in her mind. He doesn't want to hang around and feel her watching him, to be a hero to her that he sure as hell is not. Jaeger pilots were supposed to be something that inspired kids like her to make a better life for themselves, to get off the streets and turn their lives around. They're not supposed to be washed-up failures who have lives that are more messed up than the kids themselves.

He also doesn't want to spend a night on the streets, cold and alone with the voices in his head. If he does, he probably won't make it to tomorrow morning. And as much as part of him wants that, the other part doesn't want Mako to have to hear about it on the news and wonder for the rest of her life if it's somehow her fault he snapped, or Kensie's memory of a Jaeger pilot, exactly what she wants to be, being some loser who couldn't keep it together and threw himself off a bridge. Like it or not, Raleigh has other people to worry about and it's just selfish of him (which is even worse than being a failure) to wreck their lives because his own is a disaster.

"Thank you. Guess I might as well take you up on it. No one's made me a better offer." He tries to sound like he isn't desperate for someplace warm to sleep. Laying here on the sidewalk, the cold has soaked into his bones, and he just the voices that come with it to go away.

"Well, then, we ought to be going. Streets aren't safe at night." The man offers his hand again, and Raleigh takes it with his good one, because he hates that he needs the help but he really doesn't think he can stand on his own. "My friends call me Mike."

"Guess you can call me Raleigh."


	8. Build a better mousetrap

Mako can hear her heartbeat in her ears. She shouldn't feel this panicky. _53 drops, 55 kills._ She has a better than perfect record in sims and combat. The sweaty palms were gone by sim drop 12. The uncontrolled leg tremor by drop 15. The pulse beating its way out of her throat by drop 17. The stomach-clenching fear that this was the last time…well, that hadn't, but she really had believed it, one way or another, before they left for the Breach.

Jake, beside her in the Hummer, seems just as nervous. No one watching him would know it, but she recognizes the signs, the way he used to act before he had to take a test, before _Sensei_ came out of the doctor's office, before he went in to ask his father if he could join the Academy. His fingers are twisted together so tight she think he'll break one, his lower lip is caught in his teeth, and he's staring at nothing. Jake's fear is characterized by stillness, and she hopes he doesn't freeze up in combat. She heard he did it once in a sim, and she doesn't blame him, but she worries about what could happen.

She worries she'll chase another R.A.B.I.T. even more than she worries that Jake will freeze up. She has control of the Onibaba memory now, but it took three more simulated Drifts for her to keep from falling into the memory of what happened after closing the Breach.

She thinks it wouldn't be so strong a memory if she wasn't worried about Raleigh's current well-being. No one has heard anything about him; she asked the Marshal before they took off for the drop. The Seattle police were able to trace his credit card to a small bar just out of downtown, but after that they assumed he'd dumped his wallet, because although the card was used at an electronics store the next morning, the security video was of a young woman in her twenties. Mako doesn't let herself think about the possibility that the reason someone else has Raleigh's cards is that he was robbed, like she saw in her Drift memory…dream…what that was she doesn't know. He's smart enough to dump anything identifying if he wants to disappear.

 _Why would he want to, though?_ She knows he was drinking, and quite a bit, from the report she saw on the credit card. She also knows that he left, because the police have the security video from there as well. What they don't know is what happened afterward. It wasn't the most affluent part of town, so some businesses don't even have cameras they could check, or the quality is too poor. It doesn't help that it was dark and raining that night. Once he left the bar, she has no idea where Raleigh went. And that scares her.

She'd thought he was doing better. She remembers the few days right after that disastrous interview, when Raleigh shut himself off from everyone and when she did see him, and accidentally collided with his arm, he flinched. She remembers seeing the blood on his sweaters that he couldn't quite wash out, and smelling alcohol on his breath, and trying to spend as much time as she could with him in the evenings because she knew how easy it would be for him to overdose on those pills he takes for his insomnia. She remembers becoming an Google and WebMD expert in how to respond to a suicide attempt. She remembers desperately tapping into the ghost Drift whenever she woke up in the middle of the night, afraid it would no longer be there.

She remembers long sleepless nights spent with tea and silence and cheesy old Bruce Lee movies (where Mako made snide commentary the whole time on how the fighting wasn't very effective, just because it made Raleigh laugh), and being grateful he at least knew he needed someone on the bad days. Raleigh never wanted to talk about what was wrong, but he knew he needed help. Sleepless nights and two mugs of coffee and dark circles under her eyes were always a small price to pay for the fact that Raleigh woke up alive one more morning.

Now he's alone, or at least she thinks he must be. Knowing him, he probably thinks he did her a favor. He's probably sure she's better off without him, especially now that the war's beginning again. They both knew he'd never be a pilot again, not with his arm. She knows exactly what he would say if she asked him to explain himself. _I'm holding you back. You deserve better._ Even after everything, she knows Raleigh still thinks of himself as broken, useless, and a failure. She tried to show him she didn't believe that. But since Raleigh was never open with her, she'd assumed it was best not to bring things up with him. Maybe that was a mistake. She just didn't want to make things any worse by reminding him that he was struggling, or making him think she was tired of his issues. _I didn't want him to think I wanted to help him because he was being a problem._ She knows Raleigh felt badly about her coming and staying all night, and about having the same conversations with her over and over about Yance and Chuck and _Sensei_. Even though she told him over and over that it wasn't a problem, she got the feeling he didn't believe her.

The vehicle stops and Mako shakes herself out of the blame cycle. She can't do this now. She has a brother to protect and maybe a world to save, again, and Raleigh would really never forgive himself if he was the reason she was distracted and something terrible happened.

Her four top Jaegers are in the launch bays. Gipsy Avenger, Saber Athena, Guardian Bravo, and Obsidian Fury. She built the Jaegers in three matched sets, each group a complimentary fighting team. Fury is the brawn, Athena is smaller but faster and more maneuverable, Bravo is bulky and built to outlast, and Venge brings the fancy weaponry. A new chainsword, twice the efficiency of Mako's first design, and powerful plasmacannons. If this wasn't an emergency, Mako would be thrilled to be taking her out and putting her through her paces.

She bumps Jake's knee with her own, and he glances at her, shoulders hunched and tense. The Marshal wants them dropped and ready to deploy in an hour, and in a few more they'll be at the Breach site. Newt hasn't seen any change since nine p.m. yesterday, but he thinks the widening is cyclic and will begin again around two this afternoon, if his calculations are right. And this time, it will be wide enough to dump Cat 1 or 2s. She's glad it isn't an immediate incursion of monsters like slattern. This almost feels like sim training, where they work you up to the bigger Kaiju by starting with easy targets. Not that she can get complacent about a Cat 1; there are almost always unpleasant surprises with these creatures, and she doubts their creators have been idle. Mako's been building better Jaegers. She's willing to bet the aliens are building better Kaiju.


	9. Children of War

Mike has at least been kind enough not to tell anyone else who Raleigh is, and Kenzie promised to do the same, after some argument and coercing on Mike's part. So when they showed up to the house, Raleigh was introduced to the four teenagers and one mother with a three-year-old eating chili at a slightly too small kitchen table as simply "Ray". He figures he'll make taking a second helping of food (which Mike insisted on) up to the guy by fixing the broken stove burner Mike was fussing with first thing in the morning.

The house isn't huge, but it's big enough that all the kids have their own rooms except Kenzie, who is voluntarily sharing with a girl named Rae. He's struggling to remember anyone else's names, but that could be because he feels like he's going to fall asleep right there at the table. Some of the younger kids are talking about staying up to play a game of Kaiju and Jaeger themed Risk, and Raleigh thinks about how differently kids take bad news than adults, but Mike shakes his head at them. "Ray's gonna be sleeping on the couch, and I think he'd appreciate it if you didn't." Raleigh appreciates that he says nothing remotely connected to his past, and that he's trying to save Raleigh having to overhear anything that might send him into a memory again. The kids groan, especially Kenzie, but they grab the game and head up the stairs.

"They'll be up half the night, and I'll have to go up there and tell them to go to sleep," Mike grumbles, but he's smiling. Raleigh helps him clear the table and wash dishes, and Mike tells him a few things about the house and the kids. After his wife and two sons died in the Kaiju war back in 2017 while they were in California visiting relatives, Mike was going through heavy depression. He decided the problem was his empty house, and instead of moving decided to open it to people who needed a place to stay. He found he connected well with the kids on the streets, with their feelings of loss and hopelessness. Raleigh gets the feeling Mike is trying to tell him it gets better. He appreciates it, in a way, but he and Mike are fundamentally different when it comes to people. Mike found healing in them, but all Raleigh ever finds is more pain.

Even with the broken spring jabbing at his leg and the musty smell like a few too many cookies and dirty socks have fallen between the cushions, the couch is a thousand times better than the alleys or bridges. Mike comes out from a back room with a stack of blankets folded over his arm, and hands over three immediately. Raleigh's about to tell him he doesn't need that many when he realizes his hands are shaking and he can barely feel his feet.

Mike sits down next to him and glances at the dining room. Anna, the young mother, is just going upstairs with her son…Jim, was it? Mike lowers his voice a little.

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah. What happened before, that isn't…normal for me. It's just been a hell of a day."

Mike nods. "Just wanted to be sure."

"I'm fine."

"Listen, man, I respect that you've got the stoic front going for you, but no one here is gonna judge you for anything. If you need help, you let us know and we'll give it, no questions asked."

Raleigh shrugs. "Don't need it. Been doing fine on my own." He doesn't want to owe Mike something he can't repay, because the kind of help he needs is way more than a meal and a bed. He doesn't think Mike needs to be some messed-up pilot's therapist. He doesn't want to be in Raleigh's head.

"They weren't joking when they called you the Becket _Boys._ " The man shakes his head. "My God, when I saw the age of the kids they put in those Jaegers I felt sick. Watched you and your brother after Yamarashi; you were all laughs and cocky grins, but you, you looked like nothing more than a kid playing "Kaiju and Jaegers". You were so damn young." _I was eighteen. Yance was twenty-one. After it was over he went and bought us both beers. He said if I was old enough to die I was old enough to drink._ Mike sits down, shaking his head. "They sent a boy off to war, and now they don't want to do anything about the consequences."

Raleigh realizes Mike thinks the PPDC cut him loose, and then wonders if maybe they have and he just hasn't heard about it yet. They should, after all this. He was only still in because it wasn't good PR to kick half the team that saved the world out of your program. Now there's not really much time to worry about what people think. It's time for the PPDC to go back to war mode. Which means cutting off anything useless. Like him.

"Most of the kids who come through here, they've got some messed up childhoods. But you, yours is one of a kind." Raleigh doesn't feel like these kids, but really, he isn't much different. He never got to have a normal life. He bounced from the Academy at seventeen to the Jaegers, to the Wall, to the Resistance, to being someone's poster child. He doesn't have a life in the normal world. He has nothing but war. And now he doesn't even have that.

"I don't know where to go from here." He doesn't know why he's admitting this to a total stranger, but Mike seems like a decent person and he reminds Raleigh of Mako. "I'm a halfway decent welder with one good arm, and the only thing I ever knew how to do was fight."

Mike puts his hand on Raleigh's shoulder, the good one. "Don't tell yourself that, Ray. You were someone before the war started, and you had something you wanted to do. I know it's been a long time, but there's something of that old you still there. You're more than a soldier."

"The old me had a brother." Raleigh knows how bitter it sounds, but he's done caring about whether he's hurt people's feelings. "I had Yance and I could do anything, because he told me I could. But he's gone, and the only thing I want to do is get him back, and I can't." He catches himself, because his voice is getting louder and the last thing he wants is for the whole house to find out who he is because he's having a breakdown in the living room.

"Maybe he's not as far gone as you think." _That's the problem. He's right here, inside my head, and he's disappointed. But I'm not good enough for anything else, not anymore. I got my brother killed. Wasn't even a good soldier._ Raleigh doesn't notice what Mike says after that, but he does realize his face is wet and his eyes are scratchy from silent crying. He rolls over and buries himself in the blankets and for once, sleep isn't a long time coming. He doesn't even hear Mike get up and walk away.


	10. All you have to do is fall

The waiting is the worst. Mako prefers moving a Jaeger to combat under its own power, because even though it means the Kaiju are closer to land and the pressure is on, it means there's something to be doing, to occupy the Drift space in between the co-pilots.

Now, strung up between the choppers, there's nothing to do but wade through a muddle of her and Jake's memories. She's dealt with her own grief over _Sensei'_ s death, but she can tell that Jake's emotions are still raw, because the closer they get to the Breach drop, the more she sees that black-edged envelope. She wonders if they'll fly over the place where Striker Eureka went under, and if they do, if her own memories will bleed into the Drift. She hopes she can control that; they don't need Jake spiraling out of sync because for the first time he witnesses the reality.

She tries instead to focus on the good things, like making caramel sauce in the kitchen that boiled over and hardened into the pan so horribly they threw the whole thing away and made excuses to _Sensei_ when he searched every cupboard in the house later. Or Jake climbing the stair railing to try to touch the light globe in the hallway, and Mako catching him when he fell, and him laughing and wanting to do it again. She remembers a quiet afternoon on the shore of a lake somewhere, with _Sensei_ falling asleep holding his fishing pole and herself and Jake in the water, chasing frogs and trying to sneak them into the lunch basket to take home. She tries to remember the times they were a family.

There's a sudden jabbing of sound into a memory of Stacker at the piano, picking out the melody of "Scarborough Fair" while Mako and Jake painted their cardboard Jaegers. "Drop in ten minutes. Secure harnesses and prepare for impact." Mako presses into the rigging, feeling all the bolts snap into the full lock positions. They can't transport like that, or their joints will stiffen up and they'll have a harder time fighting. This is another of Mako's improvements. She remembered the uncomfortable tension on the long run to the Breach, and from Raleigh's mind she knows how hard it can be to limber up after you've been bolted in tight to the harnesses.

Jake does the same, and she can feel the sudden adrenaline spike through his body. He's ready to fight. She wishes she could feel the same rush. But something about this feels wrong. And more wrong than not having Raleigh there. That adrenaline spike should have been mentally triggered. Which means she should have had one too. But she's just feeding off Jake's.

If it's just a hiccup, they have little to worry about. The old Jaegers, especially the Mark I and IIs, had unreliable connections. Pilots fought with sub-par Drift all the time. She's heard _Sensei_ 's stories about how he and Tasmin would temporarily drop out of sync, and she always thought it was exciting, heroic. She doesn't think so when it's happening to her. It might just be a one-time problem, but if it happens during a fight, they could be in real trouble. Losing sync now, with the new programming they put in the Drift systems, will cause the whole system to go into a failsafe mode to keep the pilots' brains from overloading. The Jaeger will send out a distress signal and lock into a protective autopilot function, and is intended to be protected by its partners. Mako just wishes they didn't have to test this so early.

According to a Shatterdome legend, the Kaidanovskys entirely lost Drift off the coast off Magadan. They still managed to finish the fight, staying perfectly coordinated without the mental link. And she knows _Sensei_ 's stories about Tacit Ronin's team, who piloted her for the last time without Drifting at all. But Mako doesn't know Jake well enough to do that. Hell, she didn't know Raleigh well enough to do that.

The helicopters disengage and there's the stomach-churning plunge, then a splash as Venge hits the water. The Breach beacons are directly ahead of them, and she can see the glow through the water already. It's about to open.

"Twenty minutes to Breach activity." It's Newt, and the familiar voice calms the nerves in Mako's stomach a little. The waiting does not. She can see Saber Athena, Guardian Bravo, and Obsidian Fury waiting, flanking them. She wonders how their pilots are holding up. It's not her first battle, but it is theirs. Julia Hannity and Akela Ross in Athena, Michael Jones and Kamala Hassan in Bravo, and Alex Connor and Gideon Emil in Fury. They're her top pilots, the best of the best. She wonders if Jules and Kela are already planning a night on the town after a win, if Mike is thinking about how he can get a few hits in so he's more popular with the "chicks" he's always trying to impress, and Kamala is laughing at him and secretly wishing he'd realize he's already impressed her. And Alex and Gideon are probably designing the logo they're going to paint on Fury's shoulder to signify their first (of many) kill.

Up until now, she didn't think about what it means that she knows them all. But now, the fight is coming and the reality is that they may not all walk away. _Sensei'_ s voice echoes in her mind. "Those are my Rangers that die every time a Jaeger falls." Now they are her rangers. She hopes _Sensei_ would be proud. She has followed his path. But it is a hard one. And she understands now better than ever why he did not want her in a Jaeger. She doesn't know if she could bear to lose any one of those Rangers.

Then the water swirls, parts, and something swims up, dark against the amber glow from the Breach. "Kaiju signature detected." Mako braces for impact, in case the thing attacks immediately. But when it surges up out of the water, she stumbles.

It's Onibaba but twice the size. Mako watches the horrifying creature tower over all four Jaegers and let out a deep bellow. Her mind is racing after the R.A.B.I.T. She has to come out, to fight. She has to anchor to Jake, the way she used to with Raleigh. She feels for his mind, through the Drift, but it's like reaching through mud. The connection is jumbled and only halfway there. _She's falling from the treehouse. Jake is reaching for her, eyes huge and wide and scared. His sweaty fingers brush hers and she tries to grip but she's seconds too late and she's falling_. Mako hears a voice in her head…"neural handshake at 45% and dropping…losing integrity…connection failure…" Then her world goes red and gold, and she's falling, _falling out of the tree, falling down, down, down, into the Breach, burning as she falls._


	11. Burn

Raleigh wakes up screaming. He's burning alive. _A flaming orange sky, rippling waves of light_. _Falling, falling, falling._

"Hey Ray, wake up! Please, you're scaring me!" He scrambles out from under the blankets, shoving whoever this is away. He hears a thud and a yelp, but he can't remember who it is. Jaz? Mako? Did he hurt them?

He can't get that burning sky out of his head. It's following him, trying to kill him, like those monsters. He sits down on the floor, resting his head in his hands and rocking back and forth, trying to focus on his breathing, his movements, the rough carpet under his bare feet.

Finally, he becomes aware of the dusty smell of the room, the tears dripping through his fingers, the voice of someone standing over him, shaky but concerned. "Ray? Are you all right? Are you going to do that coma thing again? Please don't, you scared me." _Kenzie_. He remembers pushing someone away from him. Oh God, did he hurt her? She kneels next him, rubbing her elbow. "Ray?"

Now that he's thinking clearly, awake, the room is chilly. He shivers, rubbing his arms. Kenzie hands him one of the blankets and he wraps it around himself, staring at his shaking hands.

"Do you want coffee?" He shakes his head. He doesn't drink anything with caffeine. What he needs is a beer…no, no, that just makes things worse. He can't do that. But that nightmare…he was burning. He can't tell if he's hot or cold and he thinks he might be sick.

"Do you need to talk? You were yelling for Mako and crying." Kenzie sits down next to him and twists her fingers in the blanket's fringe. "I just thought you might…"

"You want to fix everything, but some of us don't want to be fixed!" Raleigh can see the instant pain in the kid's eyes. _Shit, I didn't mean to yell at her._ He doesn't want to talk. He wants to forget.

"Sorry." Kenzie stares at the floor like she can burn a hole in the carpet.

"It's not your fault, kid. I'm the one who should be sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you." He awkwardly puts an arm around her shoulder.

"You need a shower." Kenzie wrinkles her nose. Raleigh realizes he's sweated through his shirt and she's right, two days on the street did leave him a bit of a mess. "Mike has lots of clean clothes, I'm sure he'll have something to fit you."

He nods, and starts walking out into the hallway, then hears Kenzie giggling. She points in the opposite direction he was going. He shrugs, just a little, and follows her directions.

His clothes are wrecked, grimy and stiff and torn, and washing away the dirt and spilled beer feels like washing away some of the awful thoughts that got him here in the first place. He doesn't bother shaving-he'll be less recognizable with the beard.

The water sputters, turning icy, and Raleigh leaps back out of the spray. _Rain. Cold._ _Alone._ He shuts the water off, shaking, feeling hot tears mixing with the cold drips running down his cheeks from his hair. _There's no getting away from the pain. No washing it away._ He traces the raised, dark Drivesuit scars on his shoulders. _Yance. Mako._ He wonders what they'd say if they could see him now, breaking down in a shower, crying because the damn water is cold and he can't stop remembering. He feels like a child again, like the time he was beaten up by those kids back in middle school and Yance sat with him at the nurse's office with a box of Kleenex and ice for his black eye.

He has no one to take care of him anymore. No family left. Jaz is in the wind. Yance is dead. Mako is fighting a war without him…Mako. He reaches out for her; maybe he can at least feel her thoughts somewhere. _Fire. Burning alive. Falling, down, down, down._ He gasps and slides down the wall, resting his head on his knees. _Mako is falling. She's dying._ He wonders if the Breach opened, if she fought, if the Kaiju killed her. Or if she tried to close the Breach like he did, if that's why he feels her falling, burning. He thought at first it was just his own memories. But he's in Mako's mind and this is her pain, her fire.

Raleigh whimpers, shaking with silent sobs. _I left her alone and now she's dying. It's my fault. I wasn't there for her and she left and she's dying alone. Everyone dies._ If he believed in things like that, he'd say he was cursed. _Mako, where are you?_ He wants to find her, save her. But he can't. He's useless, broken. He can't save anyone. He can't even save himself.


	12. Just one mistake

Jake wants out of the med-bay. He doesn't know what happened during the fight, although he knows from the constantly scrolling newsfeed on the wall that between Athena and Fury the Kaiju was taken down. The last thing he remembers is Mako falling, screaming, into thin air, still feeling her sweaty fingers brush his palm.

Mako isn't even in the same room with him. She's in a private ward, apparently still in deep coma. Jake wasn't supposed to know any of this, but when the medics were bringing him out they sounded very concerned, and deeply relieved when he woke up. He remembers them saying something about not understanding the difference, and he guesses they said that because he and Mako should have gone under the same way, and both woken up the same.

The doctors won't tell him anything, and he's sure he won't be allowed to see her. He knows it was always like that when Dad had to go in for treatments. Jake never got to see him until everything was over, and then he was a little paler, the smile a little faker, when he gave Jake a reunion hug.

He knows, logically, why the PPDC is so hush-hush about pilots' conditions, even to fellow pilots. While many organizations make employees sign disclosure waivers, the PPDC made Jake sign one on his first day at the Academy that stated that all his medical records and procedures were to be treated as confidential under PPDC Regulation 51B, and he was not allowed to discuss any medical details, no matter how minor, with anyone unless he filled out permission form 63-754-F. He knows that in the war years that regulation got trampled on, for the most part, with pilots sharing war and scar stories and trying to outdo each other. But now, under McTavish, the rules are back in full force.

He's her copilot and family. He should be there by her side. But he's pretty sure that McTavish knows if he sees Mako laying there, so small and fragile and almost dead-looking (he can see her in his head, like his friend Kaela looked the time she fell in the lake and Dad had to pull her out and give her mouth-to-mouth), then Jake will move heaven and hell to get answers, and he will tell the press everything. Right now, the only thing keeping him from busting out of here and going straight to those reporters with the whole story of McTavish's insistence on using a Jaeger with untested Drift tech is thinking maybe if he stays on their good side he'll get to see Mako eventually.

He can see how this job wore Dad down. There are so many rules, so much stupid, time-consuming bureaucracy. When he was a kid, he imagined being a Jaeger pilot as simply being able to go out and smash Kaiju in the face, and doing news interviews. The reality of it, both at the Academy and here, is a lot of boring downtime that the brass manages to fill with boring paperwork, and being asked the same questions over and over when something goes wrong.

No, he doesn't know what happened. He doesn't think Mako chased the R.A.B.I.T. Yes, he was having trouble connecting to her, so she could have. Yes, he was having trouble before she started losing control. No, he doesn't know if everything was connected properly. They were in the middle of preparing for a war, he has no idea if the techs got all the hookups right.

He's letting his anger get the best of him, and he knows he shouldn't, but _these people are the reason Mako is catatonic and if someone would have just listened to her I wouldn't be here now._

He's relieved when the somewhat spooked-looking nurses leave, clutching their clipboards as if Jake was going to punch them like they were the invaders from space (honestly the thought crossed his mind; he prefers fighting kaiju to dealing with actual humans). The relief doesn't last, because Marshal McTavish enters before the door even closes. (The kaiju don't deserve the degradation of being put on the same level as this guy. It would be an insult to their intelligence and their regard for human life).

"What do you want?" Jake's struggling to keep the fury out of his voice. He'd like nothing more than to stomp McTavish under one of Venge's giant feet, but the man is the only way he's going to get permission to see Mako.

"I'd like you to make a press statement that the Jaeger malfunction was a pilot error, not faulty technology."

"There was something wrong before Mako started fading out. She and I both felt it. There hasn't been enough time for conclusive diagnostics."

"You and I know that. The bloodhounds trying to tear through the doors with their video cameras don't. Listen, if rumor gets around that these new Jaegers have tech faults, no one's going to feel safe. Not the people we're protecting, not the parents whose kids are pilots. It would be a disaster."

"But if there is a technical problem, people have a right to know. And Gipsy Avenger was the only one with an experimental system. Which you ordered scrapped in favor of the old hookups." Jake wonders if the problem was a tech compatibility. Maybe the system designed for wireless drift wasn't made to work with the old wired harness system.

"All the more reason to keep things calm. Gipsy Avenger is the first step toward remotely piloted Jaegers. Soon we won't need to send pilots out in them. Our people can stay safely on land while the Jaegers fight Kaiju. And if word gets around that the new systems aren't fuctional, it could set the program back by years, years we can't afford now. We'd lose all backing and support."

"The only reason Mako's new systems failed was because you ordered her people to do a rush job. She had Venge set up for her new design and you made them replace it. If anything went wrong, that's why." _I can't be sure it wasn't an error on Mako's part. But I know her. She'd be meticulous at every stage of design. And I know McTavish, more focused on results than safety. All this talk about the safety of the remot pilot program, like a little hiccup is going to make that much of a difference when the Jaegers just became the world's hope again. He just doesn't want word getting out that he's the reason the only First Kaiju War pilot still in action is currently comatose._ It feels wrong to say First Kaiju War. But there's another one now, so it's the only thing to do.

He remembers Dad reading them books about history, and how the First World War was supposed to be a war to end all wars. People had really believed it then. And now, everyone had believed the Kaiju were gone for good. History repeating itself. _We were so sure they'd never come back. We told ourselves there'd never be another war like this._ In a way, he can understand McTavish's actions. No one was prepared for this. He did what he thought he had to in the moment. But that didn't change the fact that the man was arrogant and bullheaded and didn't listen to the one person who actually knew what she was talking about when it came to Jaeger tech.

"I won't make a statement like that. I won't have my sister's name dragged through the mud because of a lie." Mako isn't a failure. It isn't her fault this happened. He knows how fast a Jaeger pilot's reputation can be irreparably damaged. He watched it happen over and over to people in his dad's Shatterdomes. As soon as anything went wrong, from a kaiju making landfall to a Jaeger getting destroyed to a pilot's death, whoever was blamed went from being a hero to a scapegoat. That's what happened to Mako's old co-pilot.

Mako and Raleigh had both been at Dad's funeral. Jake hadn't seen Raleigh Becket since the man dropped off the grid after his brother died. Or more accurately, was ordered to resign or be dismissed in disgrace. Raleigh had changed a lot since he was at Dad's Anchorage Shatterdome. From the few times he'd come to the Shatterdome with Dad while school was out, Jake had remembered a mischievous prankster who enjoyed playing practical jokes on other pilot crews and his own brother, someone who never stopped smiling and had enough energy to play Kaiju and Jaegers at the end of a long day when Jake was bored and couldn't find anyone else willing to take the time.

The Raleigh from the funeral was a different person. Serious, with a prematurely lined face and sad eyes. Someone with a weight of guilt shoving him down, making him seem shorter than the giant hero Jake remembered. Jake knew some of that was unavoidable; Becket lost his brother in Drift and it had wrecked him. But some of the pain was what people had said. Jake remembered his own anger and confusion when he watched the news and listened to the man he'd always heard praised as a hero instead called a failure and a disgrace. People were ruthless. The slightest thing could make them turn, and when they did it was a feeding frenzy. Jake was pretty sure, from the memories he'd seen in Mako's head, that Raleigh was falling apart, probably partly because of that unreasoning blame. He wasn't going to let that happen to Mako.

"If you want me to say someone failed out there today, it won't be Mako I blame. It will be me."


	13. When it all falls apart

When Raleigh finally gets himself together and dressed, he goes back downstairs hoping he's not unforgivably late for breakfast and that no one asks why he's still sniffling.

As soon as he hears the TV in the background, he knows being asked any questions is the least of his problems. "The Breach opened at a rate much higher than Dr. Geisler's predictions. A Category III Kaiju, bearing marked similarities to Onibaba, was killed by Jaegers Saber Athena and Obsidian Fury. During the battle, for unknown reasons, Gipsy Avenger's drift systems failed and her pilots went into failsafe stasis. Their status at this time is unknown. Marshal McTavish has declined any comment on Rangers Mori and Pentecost's condition."

Raleigh doesn't realize he's falling until Mike catches his arm. "Here, sit down." Mike's face is pure pain and sympathy.

"I wasn't dreaming." Something happened out there that made Mako feel like she was burning, falling. And he wasn't there to help her. Raleigh stumbles to a seat, and leans over, putting his head in his hands. _It was my job to protect her, but I'm nothing better than a washed-up has-been who can't even do his own job anymore._ He's going to be sick. _I'm supposed to be her co-pilot but I'm not good enough._ It should have been him they're talking about, not Mako and Pentecost's son. Raleigh barely remembers Jake, but he did see him at the funeral. He looked so much like his father Raleigh was startled. _It's my fault Pentecost's kid had to get in one of those Jaegers._ He might not have met Jake often, but he remembers the Marshal talking about his son with nothing but admiration. Jake had been at college for engineering, before they closed the Breach and the Jaegers seemed like a safe job. Pentecost hadn't wanted either of his two children in a Jaeger. And now his worst fear is reality. Both of them are in serious trouble. Raleigh can't even tell, from the report, if they're alive.

 _I do not need your sympathy or your admiration. All I need is your compliance and your fighting skills. And if I can't get that...then you can go back to the wall that I found you crawling on. Do I make myself clear?_

Raleigh can hear the Marshal's words as clearly as if Pentecost is in the room with them. He flinches. _Your fighting skills._ Raleigh has none left. His left arm is shot, his right one barely cooperates with him, and his brain is a scrambled mess that gets stuck in the past and drags him down. He's useless, worthless. And because of that, Mako and Jake are in trouble. Because he can't do what Pentecost asked for. _I should have gone back to the wall._

In the meantime, the TV is droning on in the background. Reporting has switched from the LA Shatterdome to the streets. A reporter is interviewing a female Kaiju Cultist, and he seems nervous around her. She shrills something, and the tone catches Raleigh's attention.

The exaltation on the cultist's face is sickening. "The Survivor, the Child, has at last been punished. And soon, all the rest who trust in the Jaegers and their blasphemous pilots…" Kenzie switches the TV off, face a mask of horror and anger.

"They're sick," One of the kids comments. Raleigh nods, unable to say anything. He always hated the cultists, with their complacency toward human death, and their hatred of Jaeger pilots. He ran into one in a bar in Nome once, early on on the Wall. The man didn't know who he was, and was talking about how the Jaegers were going to fall to the Kaiju. When he said Yance deserved to die, Raleigh had lost it, and nearly killed the man before someone pulled him off. He left for Sitka the next day, before word got around that he was in town. There was a decent following of the BuenaKai church in Nome, judging by the graffiti and vandalism to the Wall and equipment he'd seen working there. He didn't want to wait around and find out what the man's friends would do to someone who not only beat up one of their people, but was in their eyes a monster who deserved to die.

Not that he didn't believe that of himself then. If anyone should have died out there it was him, not Yance. He might believe he shouldn't have survived, but he'd never believe Yance deserved it. That was the only thing that kept him from just waiting there for the inevitable. He couldn't let them win, couldn't let them drag Yance's name through the mud by using Raleigh to prove a point.

And now they've gone after Mako. He can't smash in the nose of that ostentatious prophet, but maybe there is something he can do. Mako's probably going to be mad as hell when she hears about this. He can take the press attention for her at least, and give them something more to talk about (the useless ex-Ranger who ran away and has a laundry list of mental issues), so she can focus on her work. She's going to be taking enough heat for the fact that one of her Jaegers, and the one she put the new Drift system in, malfunctioned. He guesses it's lucky it only damaged her and Jake. If it had been one of the others, he's willing to bet at least one family member would want Mako's head for that kind of flaw. Even though it happens all the time; no Jaeger is perfect.

"Mike, can I borrow a phone?"


	14. All of our flaws

As it turns out, Jake doesn't have to say it's Mako's fault, or his own. Some intern from Drift Systems with a weight on her conscience and probably feeling she has nothing to lose comes forward with the test results on Venge, stating that there's a clear break in one of the main neural links. It's a tech failure, something that happened on the rushed install, and now there is proof.

Marshal McTavish is mad as hell, but now the story's out and there's nothing he can do. The intern is promptly fired, and to keep control of a devolving situation McTavish decides to give in to Jake's demands to see his sister.

So now he's sitting in the private observation ward, watching his big sister laying there hooked up to more machines than she is in a Jaeger. It looks wrong, seeing Mako so still. She was never still. Very few people know she has nervous habits, but Jake is aware of them all. He knows she curls her toes in her shoes when she speaks in front of people, because she broke the seam of her sneakers when she gave a report in biology class on Kaiju Blue. He knows she used to bite her nails until they bled, so Stacker sat down with her every Sunday night before school and painted them all sorts of colors, until eventually she settled on blue, like her hair now. He'd let her paint his too, even if the other PPDC officers gave him crap about it. He knows she twists the blue tips in her hair when she's thinking, taps her fingers in rhythm on tables, and holds clipboards in a death grip. But none of that is anything like the still, silent person in the bed.

Mako looks like a doll now. Fragile, small, easily broken past repairing. He didn't think Mako could ever look like that, and it's terrifying. He puts his hand over hers, avoiding the IV lines they've got feeding into her. "Hey Sharky, please wake up." She hated that childhood nickname. He really hopes she'll wake up just to smack him and tell him never to call her that again. _It wasn't my fault we learned about Mako sharks in Environmental Sci._

But nothing changes. Not even the steady beep of the heart monitor. A nurse comes in, fiddles with the IV, and writes something on a chart. She puts a hand on Jake's shoulder as she leaves.

"She's not showing any signs of change. You look exhausted. You should get some rest." Jake shakes his head. He can't leave now. He feels more stable the closer he is to Mako, Drift hangover probably. Maybe it will help her too, if he stays nearby.

Mako's phone, sitting on a shelf with the rest of her personal items, buzzes. Jake jumps so hard he knocks over his chair and almost falls onto Mako's bed. It takes him too long to right himself, and by the time he gets to it the phone has stopped ringing. It's not a number the phone, or he, recognizes. _Probably some stupid telemarketer. World is coming to an end, but they're still going to try and sell another credit card no one needs._ He puts the phone back, on silent. No one can possibly call who is more important than his sister.


	15. History repeats itself

It's sheer luck Raleigh doesn't drop the phone when he hears Mako's businesslike voicemail. " _This is PPDC Engineer Mako Mori. Please leave a message at the tone. If this is urgent, please call back in half an hour._ " He remembers her recording that, and then shutting it off and saying jokingly, "And if this is Raleigh, try the Drift." He has. All he gets is confused chaos.

"She's not answering?" Kensie is more visibly distressed than Raleigh. She's sitting at the kitchen table, ripping apart some old appliance that looks vaguely like a toaster from hell, and attaching the wires to a circuit board.

"No." He doesn't want to know why. Maybe she's just in meetings, giving someone hell for messing up her Jaeger. Or maybe she's training, working off stress. Or meditating; she did that sometimes after bad days too, and she hated to be disturbed during that. It was so rare that she actually got into that calm mood that she couldn't bear to have it broken. _There are lots of good reasons for her not to answer the phone._

He feels suddenly guilty because he's pretty sure this is what he did to her when he left. No warning, no information, no way to know if he was still even alive except a weak, faded Drift connection.

"Here." He hands the phone back to Mike. He's got to find out if she's okay, and he has to start now. Maybe if he can hitch a decent ride he can get to LA within the next 24 hours.

"Is there anyone else you could call?" He could. He thinks he remembers McTavish's number. He knows he remembers PPDC general switchboard. But chances are an outside call like this would get lost in the shuffle. Maybe Herc. He's not Marshal anymore but he might be able to get an in.

He dials the Aussie's number and is releieved when Herc picks up on the second ring with a gruff, "Don't want whatever you're selling, and if you're trying to get me back in a Jaeger, go and…"

"Herc, it's me. Raleigh." There's a clattering crash on the other end. "Herc?"

"Becket? Where the hell are you?"

"Long story. What happened out there today?"

"No one's telling me a damn thing. McTavish sent Mako and Pentecost's son out in Gypsy Avenger but she wasn't ready yet and something went real bloody wrong. She carked it, and the press are all over some Drift glitch. They say there was something wrong in the connections, and that's why they lost control. Still haven't heard anything from Jake or Mako."

"I need to get back to LA. I'm in…" he stops, frowning, yesterday was such a blur. He covers the phone's mouthpiece for a second, no sense in Herc thinking he really went off the deep end. "Kensie, where are we?"

"Pocatello Idaho. Smack dab in the middle of nowhere."

Raleigh leaves off the last part. Herc sounds a bit taken aback. "Okay. Well, I'll get a hold of McTavish. Sure he'll be plenty happy to have you back." Raleigh isn't. No one's bothered to look particularly hard for him. He's honestly surprised when the phone rings again about fifteen minutes later and it's McTavish, telling him they have a chopper on the way.

He's got nothing to pack, so waiting is driving him up the wall. He has nothing better to do than stare at the monstrosity Kensie is slowly constructing on the table. It has too many loose wires to look safe.

"Kensie, what are you doing?"

"Automating the door for Kevin so he can get his wheelchair in and out without needing anyone else." She holds up the complicated system of wires. "I'm going to attach it to the doorbell."

"Won't that open it every time someone rings?"

"Nope. He has a special knock he uses when he needs to get in. I'm going to program the button to respond to the same pattern. And if I do it right I can wire the door to actually unlock when he does it."

Raleigh's seen something a lot like this before. He's watched someone take parts of trash and build something no one should be able to. Geisler. He still remembers Gottleib, slightly drunk in the victory celebrations, repeating "Newton created a neural bridge from garbage and Drifted with a Kaiju."

"How long have you been building stuff like that?"

"Ever since I saw Mako in a PPDC advertisement. I figured if she could learn how to build Jaeger systems, so could I." She taps a few wires with her finger. "Then I figured out I was really freakin' good at it."

"How much do you know about the Jaeger systems?"

"Loads. Half the reason I wanted to meet Mako was that I think I might have figured out a way to make the neural links about twice as fast, if you bypassed the cycling shock inhibitors. They haven't needed those since the Mark II's, not since they added the feedback looping to control neural backlash, but they still go into all the designs." This is all gibberish to Raleigh, but he figures it wouldn't be to Mako. _Holy heck. And this girl lives on the streets and does God knows what to make a living. She's smarter than half the people in the PPDC._

"What if something about a Drift system went wrong?"

"I've never seen a real one before. But I'd like to try." He watches her work until he hears rotors. It's one of the "Mercy Hummingbirds", the little choppers designed for city evac that can fit into small street spaces to do emergency airlifts in crowded or damaged areas. Everyone from the house is coming out to see what's happening. It feels like Sitka all over again. Only this time, the Marshal isn't Pentecost, and Raleigh doesn't have to be convinced to leave.

He climbs in and holds the door open behind him, calling forward to the pilot to wait. Kensie is standing there in the street with leaves blowing over her shoes and her arms crossed, holding her thin jacket closed in the rotor backwash. He remembers another girl in the middle of a street, with a broken shoe in her hands and nothing left of the place she called home.

"Get in." Kensie gapes.

"What?"

"I meant it."

McTavish leans out, glowering. "We're not taking a kid."

"It's either her, or leave without me." Raleigh is pretty sure he knows how this is going to go. He's expendable, after all. But McTavish is full of surprises today.

"Fine. She comes."


	16. Find me in the Drift

The world is dark. Something like snow, but burnt and grey, is falling all around her. Mako knows this memory. In a few minutes she'll be holding her shoe, standing in a destroyed, abandoned street, watching a nightmare monster coming for her.

But this time she knows it's a memory. She knows it isn't real. And she pushes it away. _Stay in the Drift. The Drift is silence._ But there is no drift. No one is there. She's alone in her mind, and it's terrifying. She wonders if this is how Raleigh felt after Yancy died. _It is._ She doesn't so much hear that as simply somehow know it, courtesy of the part of Raleigh that is now embedded in her. _The hardest thing to live with is the silence._

She reaches out, feels around her. Nothing. Only a blank black space and that drifting ashy snow. She turns fully around. There. Against the blackness, something casts a more solid shadow.

She starts walking toward it, but every step is as heavy as if she's locked into a conn-pod harness, trying to lift the Jaeger's feet without any hydraulic assist. There's water pooling on the ground. She can't tell how deep it is.

"Hello?" No one answers, her voice echoes.

She's not afraid. Fear isn't a word that exists here. It's like anything can happen, but nothing too. Nothing is real here. No one can hurt her. Or at least that's what she tells herself. Is this what it means to be dead? She thought there was supposed to be a light.

She reaches the solid shape. It is a Drivesuit, like her own. Black and sleek. She flicks the release for the helmet. From inside, there is a breathy sigh. Eyes flick open, a smile breaks the darkness.

"Mako. Didn't I say you could always find me in the Drift?"


	17. Makeshift solutions

Raleigh's out of the chopper before it even fully settles to a landing. Kensie follows him out on shaky legs; she just barely managed to not throw up when they started the descent.

"Is this how the Drop feels?" she croaks, swallowing with difficulty.

"Sorta." Raleigh isn't paying much attention to her. He needs to see Mako. All McTavish will tell him is vague. Very little he didn't already know. Something went wrong when they engaged a Kaiju at the Breach. Mako is still comatose, although Jake has woken up and shown so far no side effects of the issue. There's been no change in Mako's condition.

McTavish follows them into the infirmary, and he starts talking to a nurse who is blustering about regulations and immediate family and clearance. Raleigh's on the point of using one of Mako's less damaging floor throws and walking past anyway when someone steps out into the hall. For a minute Raleigh flinches, blinks, because it looks like that's Stacker Pentecost under the glare of cold fluorescent lights. But that's far too young to be him.

"They're with me." Jake even _sounds_ like his father. No one would ever dare contradict the Marshal. Well, except Raleigh those few times, and it had never been easy to go up against that man's cool calm. The same hold true for his son. The nurse nods and goes back to her station.

"McTavish, they need to be able to come and go as they choose." Jake has his arms relaxed at his sides, but he doesn't need to fold them to look commanding. It's in his nature.

"Of course." Raleigh wonders what's going on here. McTavish is known for having an iron hand with all his people. And Jake is giving the orders here.

Raleigh crosses the hall; Kensie trailing him nervously. Jake nods to him. "I'm glad you're here. Maybe it will help."

"What's going on?" He'll get a straight answer from Jake at least. It won't be in any of those medical mumbo-jumbo terms Raleigh doesn't understand, that the doctors use when they want to hide something. He learned that a long time ago, when they were losing Mom.

"She's still out. Lost connection mid-Drift, and the Jaeger went into a failsafe. She was afraid something like this could happen."

"She knew?"

"We had to install systems in hours. It's not meant to be that way. I could tell she was worried the whole time we were in."

Raleigh can't believe this. It's one thing for a new, untested Drift system to have a glitch. It's another for someone to be so worried about press and deadlines that they force the designer of said system, who knows it better than anyone else, to install it without the proper procedures or time. And he knows Mako wouldn't have gone ahead and done that without making a fuss.

"You knew she wasn't ready; she told you herself, and you sent them out there?" Raleigh turns back on McTavish, still standing in the hall, and pins the man to the wall, to hell with chain of command and regulations. He's pretty sure at this point he isn't even actually a Ranger anymore. "What the hell were you thinking?"

McTavish chokes, squirming, but he's not going anywhere. Years of training and working with his hands have made Raleigh someone you're not going to get away from until he decides he's done.

"If anything happens to her, you answer for it. I don't care what happens to me afterward. You got it?" McTavish nods, coughing. Raleigh releases him and the man backs off, rubbing his neck.

Kensie is staring. So is Jake. So are Newt Geisler and Hermann Gottleib, who've just come into the hall. Raleigh rubs his hands on his legs and tugs a bit self-consciously at the hem of his sweater. It's rare that he loses control like that, but this is _Mako._ And if McTavish is responsible for her dying…

"Newt? Hermann? What are you doing here?" Jake sounds as confused as Raleigh is.

"I helped design the Drift system for Gipsy Avenger. If something went bad it's as much my fault as anyone's." Newt's his normal loud, abrasive, nervous-energy self, but Raleigh can tell he's trying to tone it down. They step into the room and Newt stops. "Oh geez. This isn't supposed to happen." He's inspecting the monitors minutely, tapping the brain-scan one and talking too fast and in too much tech gibberish to Hermann for Raleigh to understand.

Apparently Jake can't figure it out either. "English, please, guys?"

"That's what we were speaking," Newt mutters.

Hermann is more cooperative. "She's stuck in the failsafe cycle. It's supposed to only last as long as she's in connection to the Jaeger."

"She dropped out of phase unexpectedly."

"She's probably caught in a feedback loop." It honestly takes Raleigh a minute to realize that wasn't Newt. It was Kensie. "Wouldn't you have to re-initiate Drift if she's in the wrong phase of the cycle? It's probably just incomplete."

"Possibly?" Newt adjusts his glasses and buries one hand in his spiky black hair. "But it would take a lot of work. You'd need her back in with the person she was with, and you'd need a way to stabilize because she and her co-pilot will be out of sync with each other until we break the loop."

"Could one more person in the Drift do that?" Raleigh isn't sure where that idea came from. But it might be crazy enough to work. Since when hasn't the PPDC, and even more so Raleigh himself, thrown everything on the risky hope of some long shot idea?

"You've set up a three-way Drift before. And the Wei triplets used one. It's not impossible." Kensie bounces on her toes.

"She's right. We did in in less than fifteen minutes on that dying baby Kaiju in Hong Kong." Hermann pushes some wires on the floor out of the way with his cane.

"I've never done it on a coma patient before!" Newt is more frazzled than Raleigh's seen him since the Battle of the Breach. His hair is standing on end, he's more jittery than Tendo after four cups of coffee, and his tie is wildly askew.

"We just need three rigs, a control module, and a central connection node."

"And a resonance modulator, and a bypass trigger, and a three-way failsafe."

"Those aren't actually necessary if you alter the connection frequencies right from the command module."

"That's incredibly precise tuning to do by hand."

"You Drifted with a Kaiju! With a system you made out of junk!"

"That was different. That was the last chance in a war, and only I was going to get hurt. Hermann volunteered himself."

"I'll do whatever it takes to get Mako back." It's not like any mistakes can turn Raleigh's brain into any worse mush. Maybe. At worst he'll just end up catatonic like her, and maybe everyone would be relieved.

"Same goes for me. She's all the family I have left." Jake squeezes Mako's hand.

"Help me out then, Aquamarine." Newt is already buzzing around the room.

"It's Kensie."

"We'll need to get the doctors to sign off. I'll handle them. Shouldn't be a problem after that little stunt you pulled in the hallway, Becket," Jake mutters. "I think half the Shatterdome's probably heard by now." Raleigh can't bring himself to care. As long as it gets Mako back, he'll gladly spend the rest of his life out of the PPDC, or even in jail, if McTavish decides that warranted assault charges.

It takes a few hours, during which Newt consumes approximately three more cups of coffee, Hermann starts five arguments with him and gives up in despair when he realizes the caffeine-high man will never listen to him, resorting to jabbing Newt with his cane whenever he says something Hermann thinks is incredibly stupid, Jake falls asleep in his chair twice and each time asks why they didn't wake him up, Kensie commandeers two full neural bridges and a decent command board by flirting with the cute eighteen-year-old female cadet in charge of commissary, and Raleigh tries to avoid anyone he doesn't know. At the end of that time, there's a makeshift Drift apparatus crisscrossing the room (thank God it's one of the large private ones or they'd never have the space) and Newt looks tense but ready.

"Okay. Well, it's as good as it's gonna get. You ready?"

Raleigh nods. Jake mutters something that might be yes. Both of them slip the modified helmets on and adjust them. Hermann adjusts the controls. Newt and Kensie position the third gently over Mako's head. Two nurses are standing by with full crash kits, monitoring the vital readings carefully. Raleigh wonders if they're also prepared to deal with something happening to him or Jake.

"Engaging neural handshake in three, two, one…" Kensie's voice is the last thing Raleigh hears before the world falls away in shades of blue. _Don't chase the R.A.B.I.T…_


	18. Brother I will hear you call

Raleigh is freezing, drowning. The icy water is all around him and the rain is so heavy he can barely tell when his head breaks the surface other than that the taste of the water in his throat is fresh instead of salty and isn't tainted with Kaiju Blue. He can't stay afloat, not with his useless left arm.

Behind him, he can hear metal creaking, groaning. A wave spins him around and he sees Gipsy sinking below the surface, her core glowing even as she drops down, down, down. The water's surface is streaked with Kaiju blood.

Raleigh knows exactly where he is, but it doesn't make sense. He just killed Knifehead. He should be inside Gipsy, getting her back to shore…that's the real memory, right…or is this it? Getting thrown from the torn conn-pod into the ocean to freeze and drown? It doesn't seem right, because he's not even wearing his Drivesuit, just a beat-up sweater and jeans. The Drivesuits were made to work like a wetsuit to keep a pilot warm if they had to evacuate the Jaeger…or got thrown out. But these clothes aren't doing anything but dragging him down.

He gasps for a breath and gets a lungful of burning, Blue-filled water. The shock of it makes him flail and he starts going under again. Just when he's about to give up and hope drowning isn't really as painful as he's heard it's supposed to be, something catches the collar of his sweater and yanks him back to the surface. Whoever it is pulls him up onto a low shelf of rock, and when Raleigh rolls over, choking, he's face to face with Yancy. He tries to gasp out his brother's name, but all he succeeds in doing is throwing up half a bucket of seawater.

Yance smacks him on the back, hard. "Just breathe, Rals, breathe." He does, finally, and chokes out a lungful of salty, Blue tainted water. He's gonna be in the hospital with K-pneumonia for weeks after this. Yance helps him sit up, back against the cold, iced-over stone. In the distance, the _Saltchuck_ is pitching in wave troughs, and he can just see a bit of Gipsy's trashed conn-pod sticking up out of the water. In between the flashes of lightning, the sea is a black, icy monster, snapping at his feet and trying to drag him back in. It seems angry he escaped.

Raleigh hugs his knees to his chest, shivering, teeth chattering so badly he can barely talk. Yance, for once, seems completely unaffected. Usually he was the one complaining about the weather. "Why aren't you cold?"

"I'm dead, Rals." It's so matter-of-fact that Raleigh almost misses it.

He wants to say _I'm sorry, it's my fault, I messed everything up, it should have been me, not you_ but what comes out instead is,"That's not fair. Fuck you." Yance grins and casually gives him the middle finger. _I missed this. Pretending to hate you._ He never even thought anything mean about Yance after he was dead, except maybe the one or two times he screamed at nothingness "Why did you leave?" It felt wrong to be angry at the dead, even in humor.

"Raleigh, what have you done to yourself?" Yance sounds sadly parental. _I knew he was going to bring that up._ Raleigh honestly didn't think it was as bad as it could be. His arms don't have any really fresh scars, and his clothes aren't that bad-well, they weren't until he fell in a freaking Kaiju Blue spill. The beard, okay, he can see that being an issue. No one seems fond of it, even though he kind of likes it, himself.

"I'm sorry. I couldn't deal with it." He doesn't feel like lying to Yance. If he even could. His brother's never not been in his head. Even in all those years of silence he told Mako about, he could still hear Yance sometimes. Usually when he was dangerously close to giving up.

He's expecting Yance to get mad, to say he should have talked to someone, told someone, gotten help before it came to him slashing his arms open and drinking himself into oblivion and sleeping under bridges. But he doesn't. He just leans over and pulls Raleigh into a hug. And that's too much. Raleigh starts crying, and not the confused, uncertain way it's been this whole time, where he's not even sure what he's crying for. He needs his brother and damn it, Yance is so lost the only place Raleigh can still find him is here in another person's head.

Yance doesn't let go for a long time. Even after Raleigh's stopped crying, he can feel his brother shaking from silent sobs. Yance pulls Raleigh as close as he can and runs his fingers through his hair, like he used to whenever Raleigh had nightmares. "Rals, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't there."

"It's not your fault." Raleigh doesn't think he's ever said that. Everyone's told him it's not _his_ fault, but then that means it must have been Yance's, because there has to be someone to blame. And he wanted it to be him, not Yance. So he never listened when they told him he wasn't the reason his brother was gone. Here, in the middle of the storm, it feels different. Like maybe it's no one's fault. They fought the hurricane and this time it won, just a little. _An act of God._ And neither he nor his brother had anything to do with it.

They sit there for what feels like hours, holding onto each other like they'll never let go. There are no words between them, or if there are, Raleigh forgets them a second after he says them. It's enough that they're together again.


	19. The ghosts of the past

Mako stands on the deck of a fishing boat, squinting through the spray, watching Raleigh and his brother huddled up together on a rock in the middle of nowhere. She can see them, more clearly than she ought to be able to in this storm, but she can't hear what they're saying. Another wave lashes the boat and she stumbles.

She can feel more than see _Sensei_ 's steadying presence beside her. They've been walking through the paths of her mind for hours, through stone gardens and sword forges and schools and burning city streets. Each one a memory _Sensei_ was not there in, and that he's never seen so clearly before. She knows he treasures every part of her past he's getting to know, and she wonders if he wishes he'd seen all this sooner.

It isn't just her long-lost past they've explored. She has newer memories that he's been absent for as well. The victory celebration after the Battle of the Breach, waking up in the middle of the night to sketch the first rough plans for Gipsy Avenger, falling asleep on Raleigh's shoulder when they flew to a conference in London, visiting Aunt Clare and her family for only the third time in her life.

She wishes they were all such good memories, but she has to show him Jake, walking away from an empty coffin and joining the Academy, exactly what his father never wanted, then showing up in LA to climb in a Jaeger with her. He has to see Raleigh flinch when she touches his arms and sit silently on the edge of a bed, too lost in his own nightmares for her to do more than sit and pray he comes back to her. She has to show him Herc, downing his fifth beer in one day, crying while he strokes Max.

 _I couldn't save them, Sensei. I tried, but I lost them._ She was supposed to be just like _Sensei_. She was supposed to make sure everything stayed together, even if she had to tear herself apart to do it. But she couldn't. She isn't him, and she can't be, and knowing that always feels like losing him all over again.

 _You've done more than anyone could ask. It isn't your job to save them. They need to save themselves now._ Patiently, _Sensei_ led her through _his_ memories. Luna, his sister, lost in battle. Tasmin Sevier, wasting away with cancer in a hospital bed. Tacit Ronin's collapse. The Gage twins, falling with Romeo Blue. Raleigh, sobbing for his brother in a hospital bed; shakily signing a resignation form, both his and Yancy's dog tags around his neck; walking out of a warehouse to meet a helicopter, grimy and thin and lost. Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon. Chuck, nodding to Stacker just before Striker detonated. _I couldn't save everyone either, Mako._

But now they're outside those memories, like walking through a house door into the yard, although Mako doesn't remember any clear transition. It was more like slipping into a Drift. She just opened her eyes and they were here, on the deck of a fishing boat, sliding between crab pots and loose ropes. There are men around them, yelling and running, but they don't seem aware that Mako or _Sensei_ are here. Maybe that's because they aren't here memories, she isn't supposed to be here.

These aren't even real memories, because she knows what this is. She would know even if she'd never been inside it in Raleigh's head, because she studied Gipsy Danger's last fight for years. This isn't how it was in real life. Raleigh should be turning Gipsy around, walking her back to shore on his own, trying to keep going with half his world ripped away. Instead, here, Gipsy is sinking to the ocean floor and Raleigh and Yancy are sitting together on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

She wonders if they're making peace with the past too, the way she and _Sensei_ have, wading through the wreckage of their memories to salvage what they can and start over.

Something about this world changed when she stepped onto this boat. She isn't just in her own memories, her own head now. She's in Raleigh's. Somehow, they're Drifting. She doesn't really know how that happened, because the last thing she remembers of the real world is Venge and Jake. How did Raleigh get here? It would be a more urgent question in that real world out there. Here, she doesn't argue with it. There doesn't seem to be a point to arguing with anything here. Whether Raleigh is actually in a Drift with her or not, she's here, she's seeing this, and it crosses her mind that it doesn't actually matter what's happening in the real world.

She turns when _Sensei_ rests a hand on her arm. "I have to go talk to my son now." She nods, because in front of the fishing boat the memories are changing. They're sailing right onto the lawn of a very familiar house, and through a window she can see Jake. If he's in here too, are they three-way Drifting? Once again, it feels important for a moment, but then the urgency slips away and Mako accepts the world here without a question, like people do when their dreams are wholly fantastical but they're still inside them, so everything still makes sense. Maybe none of this is happening. Maybe she's falling slowly into the Breach. Maybe this is what they mean about your life flashing before your eyes. She doesn't care, because this is peaceful. This is putting all the demons to rest.


	20. Filling shoes

Jake couldn't ever have forgotten this room. The tan walls with washed-off crayon scribbles, the smell of Dad's homemade gingerbread coming up from the kitchen underneath him, the tap-tap-tap of a tree branch on the window, posters half-peeling off the walls, each of them one of the old Jaegers. Brawler Yukon. Arroyo Desperado. Coyote Tango, which has a stick drawing of Dad on the visor.

This is Jake's room, the one he remembers best. The last one before the PPDC became the resistance and they started living in a Shatterdome.

"Hello, son." Dad's voice spins him around. Stacker Pentecost, looking years younger and healthier, stands in the doorway. He has his stained Union Jack apron, the one Tasmin bought him as a joke, and one hand is covered in an oven mitt. Jake remembers this day; he'd just made the honor roll in his first year in high school, and Dad made a gingerbread cake to celebrate. Jake hasn't had any since…since Dad died, even though it used to be his favorite. Somehow he knew no one else's would be the same, and he wanted to remember Dad's for as long as he could, but even that was fading. Now he remembers the taste like it was five minutes ago.

"Dad." Jake isn't sure whether he should run to him and hug him, or whether that's something this thirteen-year-old self from the memory would do. Now he's nineteen, all grown up. Should he prove that to Dad by acting like it?

Dad decides that for him, crossing the room and enfolding Jake in one of those massive bear hugs Jake used to anticipate every day, coming home from school.

Dad touches Jake's sweater's shoulder badge, with the redesigned PPDC logo. "McTavish never had any appreciation for simplicity." He chuckles.

"How did you…" Jake glances behind him and, just for a second, sees a shadow with blue hair that darts away like a cat. _Mako's here too._ He wonders if Dad's already talked to her. He's had time; it's been almost a day now since everything fell apart.

"I hear he graduated you early to put you in Gipsy Avenger with Mako." Jake tenses, freezes for the inevitable tirade. Most people who knew Dad as Marshal would never have anticipated the soft side he had with his children. But his children definitely knew the Marshal in him. There had been many, many stern lectures over the years, for everything from Jake being out later than he should have on his first date, to the time Mako built a neural relay in the living room and it shorted out and set fire to the drapes.

"I joined the Academy after…after the Breach closed." He feels like he should defend this somehow, have a good argument ready before Dad tears it to bits. And he has one, because he's been arguing this same thing in his head for months, only Dad's never been able to respond. "It seemed safe. No more Kaiju, the Jaegers were going to be a peacekeeping and diplomatic force. Respond to natural disasters and all that. I didn't know we were going back to war."

"Of course not. And you were tired of trying to be an engineer?" Dad doesn't even sound as disappointed as Jake was afraid he would.

"I had to go. Jaegers are my life, Dad. Just like they were yours."

"I know. And you're more than worthy of taking the Pentecost name into a new generation of them." Dad looks Jake squarely in the eyes; it's a shock to realize they're almost the same height now. "I'm proud of the man my son has become. I just wish I could have been there to see you doing it."

Jake hugs him, resting his chin on Dad's shoulder to hide the tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I let Mako down, Dad. I was her co-pilot and I was supposed to protect her, and now she's in a coma and I can't do anything."

"It's not your fault. You've done well."

"I didn't do enough. It should be me in there, not her."

"That's not up to you, Jake. Do you know how many times I wanted to trade places with Tasmin? How many times I wished I'd gone to the fighter jets instead of Luna? Jake, this is what a war is. Some people live, some people die, and we have no control over who those people are. This is why I didn't want you in the Academy. I wasn't trying to hold onto you. I was trying to save you from ever needing to know how this feels."

Jake nods silently. He pulls back a little. _All this time, I thought you were afraid. You just didn't want Mako or me to become you._ "But all we ever wanted was to be you."

Dad must be inside his thoughts, because the randomness of what Jake says out loud doesn't faze him. "I know. I knew I was your hero. I knew, when I watched you two building Jaegers out of cardboard boxes, who you wanted to be someday. But I prayed the war would be over before it happened. I tried so hard to find a way to stop it, because I never wanted you two in it. And then in the end, it was only by letting Mako in that the war finally ended." He claps Jake's shoulder. "You're already well on your way to following my footsteps, Jake. There's no going back to what you were before. All I ask is that you become the best man you can. Not me, not the you you were before this fight. Only the you you are now matters."


	21. Hello, mate

Raleigh must have fallen asleep, because when he opens his eyes again he's not in the middle of an ocean. He's in the middle of a freaking desert.

Yance isn't there anymore. Neither is the rock, or Gipsy, or anything that looks even remotely familiar. He'd kept telling himself, as the wind got colder and the storm got stronger, that he couldn't fall asleep. If he fell asleep he'd freeze. Well, he didn't. He feels like he's burning alive.

He rolls over, slowly, and there's a heat-blurred shape sitting next to him. He blinks again and it flickers into focus as Chuck Fucking Hansen. Wonderful.

"I was beginning to think you weren't gonna wake up, ya dipstick." Chuck is nonchalantly tossing handfuls of sand in the air, and they're blowing straight into Raleigh's face. He blinks, coughs, wipes the grit out of his mouth.

Raleigh thought the cold was bad. This place is hotter than hell, literally. He's beginning to see why Chuck had the attitude problems he did. _Growing up here would fry anyone's brain cells_.

"Hey, watch the attitude, _Rah_ leigh." Chuck is the same annoying little shit as ever. He's not even sweating.

"Get out of my head."

"Can't help it. Anyway, I'm not in _your_ head, I'm in Mako's. So are you." Chuck shrugs. "Guess she thinks of me as being from the real outback. Sorry to break it to ya, Mako, but I was joking all those times I said I rode kangaroos for fun. I'm a Sydney kid through and through."

"What are you doing here?" Raleigh could see why he met Yance. Yancy was in his head, always has been. But as far as he knows, neither he nor Mako drifted with Chuck. He thinks he'd remember.

"Guess you needed to talk to me?" Chuck flops on his back. "I dunno. Got no bloody clue, Ray."

"Please don't call me that."

"Fine, _Rah_ leigh." Raleigh gives up. Herc may have said his son was grateful for the rescue at Hong Kong bay, but it sure isn't showing. Although, to be fair, Raleigh didn't save him the second time around. Maybe that's where all the resentment is coming from.

 _He's a has-been… You're gonna get us all killed, and here's the thing, Raleigh: I want to come back from this mission because I quite like my life. So why don't you just do us all a favor and disappear? It's the only thing you're good at_.

"I'm sorry I let you down."

"You know I was mostly joking about dropping you like Kaiju shit, right?" Chuck laughs. An unironic, real laugh that it doesn't seem like he should be capable of. "I knew it was a suicide mission from the get-go. Just didn't like him bringing you back. Figured the Marshal was just trying to do a favor for his former golden boy. I thought you were gonna send the whole thing arse-up. But you didn't."

"But I let you die."

"Maybe it was the best thing that coulda happened." Chuck lets a handful of sand run slowly through his fingers. "I was raised in the middle of a war. It's all I knew. I wasn't gonna be good for much once it was over. What do I know how to do? Kill Kaiju, brag up my skills, and piss everyone off. Not sure there's much call for that outside the PPDC."

Raleigh knows that feeling. He's not in a much better place himself. Sure, he can weld, he knows construction, he didn't spend _all_ his adult life in the Jaegers, but really, without a war, he's pretty damn useless.

"Then we both shoulda gone down that day."

"Way I see it from Mako, ya almost did. There's no way you shoulda made it back alive. Way I figure it, that means you're supposed to keep living." Chuck shrugs again. "And I didn't. So I guess I got everything done I needed to do."

"But what if you're wrong? What if you had a whole life ahead of you and I screwed it up?"

"Guess we'll never know, will we? And what the hell did you think you were gonna do anyway? We were fighting two Kaiju at once, and you had a Jaeger with one arm and a crippled leg. There was nothing you could do for us." Chuck tosses another handful of sand in the air. "You know, it's not so bad. Nothing to worry about here. It's quiet. Never thought I'd like quiet, but I do." He lays back on the endless dry sand. Raleigh follows suit. _He's right. It's absolutely silent._ No screech of metal, no waves slapping shore, no Kaiju roars, no alarm sirens. _Peaceful._


	22. Escape

Mako's back in the ash and darkness. She can see Raleigh on one side of her, lying quiet and still, and Jake on the other, tracing his fingers over nothing but probably, in his head, over the Coyote Tango poster in his room.

She can feel _Sensei_ standing beside her. She knows, without him needing to tell her, it's time to go. Ahead of her is the street, the ash, the lost shoe; the ocean, the single escape pod, the chopper rotors in the distance. And through that is the Drift.

She goes to Jake first. When he sees her, he seems surprised, then overjoyed. He hugs her, and she lets him for a few minutes, but they can't stay there forever because the door is closing. The light from the street is fading, and she can hear Onibaba coming.

She shakes Raleigh awake, because only he could fall asleep in the middle of an actual _Drift_ , and he's even happier to see her than Jake was. He almost knocks her over when he hugs her. She's used to that. Raleigh isn't exactly gentle, but his roughness is just the clumsy, overbearing affection of a big dog excited to see the person it loves. She doesn't mind.

"Mako. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I ran away."

"Raleigh, don't you dare keep apologizing to me." She wanted to yell at him for scaring the hell out of her, for not trusting her, for running from his problems. But she can't bring herself to. Not after she watched him clinging to his brother and crying. It's not his fault he's damaged, or that he doesn't want to get close to anyone anymore. It's not his fault he's afraid to care about people.

"I should have been here. I should have told you what was wrong." He buries his face in her shoulder. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't want to hurt you." His hands are tangled in her hair, she can feel him struggling to hold back sobs. "I'm sorry I scared you."

"It's okay. I know. I know." She runs her hands over his back. "I know you didn't mean to. It's okay. You're back now. That's the only important thing." It is. As long as she knows he's here and safe, not lost and freezing and dying alone, pulled down in the darkness by his own guilt. She hopes seeing Yance and Chuck helped. Maybe he found some closure like she did. But even if he didn't, she's going to make sure she's here for him. That she doesn't sweep his problems under the rug just because he seems to want to pretend they don't exist.

"We need to go." All three of them are at the edge of the street. There's a shoe and a monster, and Mako knows somehow, this is the last time she'll see this R.A.B.I.T. in the Drift. And then they run. She doesn't know what will happen if they get caught. If Onibaba catches up, will they all be trapped in this half-Drift, half-dream world forever?

She doesn't have to find out, because all of them reach the ocean that is somehow incongruously in the middle of the city. She plunges into the water and starts swimming toward the lone escape pod. She doubles back to help Jake with Raleigh, because with his left arm as bad as it is, he's having trouble swimming. All three of them reach the pod and sit down on top of it. Raleigh rests his forehead against Mako's, just like she remembers. She has one arm around Jake and he's leaning on her shoulder. All three, together. They're safe. _I got them out, Sensei._ _We saved ourselves. Together._

And then the chopper rotors fade into rhythmic beeping and whooshing, and Mako blinks up at white ceiling instead of blue sky.

"Yes! It worked! It freaking worked!" Someone with very blue hair and someone she thinks is Newt are jumping up and down and high-fiving each other. Hermann is leaning on his cane, smiling. She looks to her left, and Jake is sitting slumped over in his chair, a Drift helmet on the ground next to him and a huge tired smile on his face. She's afraid to look to the right.

She doesn't have to, because a very familiar work-calloused hand squeezes hers. "Mako." He doesn't have to say anything else. She turns toward him. He's smiling too, not quite as wide as Jake, because she doesn't think he'll ever really be that free again, but it's enough. She doesn't think she's ever seen him this genuinely happy and peaceful, and he looks perfect, beard she _told_ him to shave a week ago and all.

She doesn't know how long she was in there. Maybe there's still a war. Maybe the world is still ending. But right now, she doesn't care at all.


	23. Waking up at the end of the world

Newt and Hermann have to leave about five minutes after the reunion, because the buoys are picking up another reading. Predictably, Mako tries to get out of bed and follow them.

"Mako, you need to rest." Jake forcibly pulls her back to her bed.

"I've been passed out for almost twenty-four hours. I don't need rest." _Now I feel like the older sibling._

"Raleigh, tell her she needs to sleep." Jake figures she'll listen to him. Unfortunately, Raleigh is in fact asleep himself, half-leaned over on Mako's bed. She looks from him to Jake, sighs, and curls up, one hand holding Raleigh's. Both of them are smiling in their sleep. Jake flops down in his own chair. The past day and a half have caught up to him too. He's out in seconds.

They wake up when McTavish comes in with a report that Thunder Herald took out a Cat II at the Breach and Aurora Flame was able to send a nuclear payload into the Breach in its body. They've cut off the throat for now, but Newt's warned them that each time it reopens it's more stable. For now, the war is over, but no one feels like celebrating yet. Last time they had two years Kaiju-free. Now they might have no more than six months.

Mako reacts to the news predictably. "We need to get the remote piloting systems perfected sooner rather than later. Next time, maybe we won't have to worry about sending our Rangers out to sea." She asks for paper and pencil, and starts having a long and animated conversation about technical things with the new blue-haired girl that Jake thinks might be called Kensie. She gets incredibly excited about something the girl said about cycling blocker things and starts scribbling everything down in her personal speed-note style that is a mixture of English shorthand and simplified Japanese characters.

"I guess you're feeling fine?" Jake was more than a little worried. How far she was under, they weren't sure if there was any brain damage. But if she's able to keep up with this tech jargon she must be perfectly okay.

"Yeah. Just a little dizzy. Still hard to adjust to time actually not jumping all over. Walking through memories for hours, I got really used to opening my eyes in another year or another place."

"What I don't understand is why we saw Chuck and Stacker." Raleigh looks comically confused, like a puppy whose food bowl has been picked up and taken away. "I thought we'd only meet people who were caught in our Drifts."

"Who do you think I made those 51 sim drops with?" Mako laughs like he's the biggest idiot in the world. " _I_ 'm not a solo pilot. But I am almost universally compatible, once you get past the little issue of the traumatic monster in my head." She grins. "Which is good, because I'm about to start training a new group of Jaeger pilots, and I'm planning on working personally with Kensie." Jake thinks the girl might overload and blow up, she's grinning so wide. "I don't think I'm getting back in the Jaegers though."

"I don't know. It felt good, what there was of it." Jake never even made it into a real fight. Maybe he'll go back to the Academy, finish training as scheduled, and take a new compatibility test. There was at least one person there whose compatible partner had been sidelined. He's been hallmates with Nate Lambert, and they studied together for Kwoon Tactics. Before he got pulled, Jake had been planning to ask Nate if they could test together at the end of the semester. Nate's blunt and tough, he and Jake match well together sparring, and he's got a razor-sharp knowledge of tactical combat. He seems like a good co-pilot. Who knows? It could be the best choice he could make.

"Just do what you know you have to." Mako squeezes his hand and then turns to Raleigh. Jake thinks he knows why she'll never go back in a Jaeger. It's not that this was traumatic. She's survived much worse. But he wasn't her perfect co-pilot. No one can replace Raleigh Becket for her, even if Raleigh's convinced himself he _is_ replaceable, and she's going to prove it to him.

Jake leaves them in the room alone, leaning against each other, drawing strength from each other's closeness. They're a matched pair. He and Mako were good, but it wasn't that. He has to find his own co-pilot himself. He pulls out his phone and dials up Nate. He realizes he's forgotten to call since Venge got zapped.

There are about twenty voicemails and texts from various people at the Academy. Fourteen are from Nate.

 _Jake, man, what the hell happened out there? Media's all over you and your sister and your Jaeger, but they're not telling us anything important. Come on, give me the inside story. You know I won't blab to anyone. Well, maybe Marsha but she hears everything anyway after a while._

 _Jake, you're freaking me out. Call me back, man._

 _Call me back. Are you still alive?_

 _Just tell me you're not dead._

 _Jake, what the hell? I had to find out you didn't kick the bucket from Twitter? And it wasn't even you. Come on, call me._

 _You're not calling anyone. Okay. I feel a little better about my importance._

 _Hey man, is Mako okay? They're showing you cleared but I don't see her._

 _Oh Jeez, Jake, is she gone? I'm sorry man. You don't have to call or anything but if you need me, I'm here for you._

 _Seriously, is she okay? You're scaring me._

 _Take your phone off silent you fucking moron and answer me! The whole damn world's falling apart and I can't get hold of you?_

 _Call me back, Jacob Oberon Pentecost._

 _Seriously? I thought that name would get you for sure._

 _Why is Becket there? Jake, I need information. Please tell me Mako's okay. You better be okay, cause if you're not I'm coming down there and I'm gonna kill you myself._

 _You moron. What were you thinking? You triple-drifted with her and Becket? That's a great way to fry your brain. You know what? I'm done waiting. I'm getting on a helo and coming down there and damn it I don't care if there is an exam in Waters's K-Bio today. I'll fucking fail the class, who cares anymore? It's not like…_

Jake dials Nate's number before he hears the end of the last message. Nate picks up on the first ring.

"What on the damn fucking earth do you think you're doing, Jake?"

"Hey Nate, I'm not dead."

"I fucking know!" Nate sounds both angry and amused. "I'm staring right at you." Jake looks up, and sure enough, Nate is coming in off the helo pad, waving. "I told you I was coming, you moron."

"You skipped out on Waters's exam?"

"What do you think? You scared the hell out of me, man!"

"Well, that's a shame, because he's probably gonna fail you. And then you're going to be held over a semester because you have to pass K-Bio, and how are you supposed to be my co-pilot if we graduate at different times?"

Nate doesn't seem to comprehend. "I don't care! My co-pilot's out, you fell off the face of the damn earth, what does it matter if I know how many brains a Kaiju…wait, co-pilot?"

"Yeah. I'm coming back."

"Well then you missed Waters's exam too. We can be in the same remedial K-Bio together, you moron." Jake laughs, and then he drops his phone and grabs Nate into a hug. _Time to start again._


End file.
